


Static

by leigh57



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-25
Updated: 2013-02-25
Packaged: 2017-12-03 15:37:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 61,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/699835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leigh57/pseuds/leigh57
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This fic is from a million years ago (or at least it feels that way in my brain), but my wonderful friend (who goes by alwaysashipper on LJ) asked me to put up some of my SVU stuff, given that the SVUfiction site is apparently down. So there you have it.</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is from a million years ago (or at least it feels that way in my brain), but my wonderful friend (who goes by alwaysashipper on LJ) asked me to put up some of my SVU stuff, given that the SVUfiction site is apparently down. So there you have it.

You and me we were the pretenders

We let it all slip away

In the end what you don’t surrender

Well the world just strips away

~~~~Bruce Springsteen: Human Touch

 

________________

 

 

The rain, uncharacteristically cold for late May, slid in miniature streams down the back of Elliot’s neck, soaking drop by drop into the faded grey heather of his t-shirt. He knew that most people carried umbrellas under these circumstances, but this morning, for a variety of reasons, he was grateful for the chilly slap of rainwater on his skin.

 

First, it was helping to render him conscious – always a bonus when he had to be at work in less than an hour. The alarm had shocked him awake at 6:30 as usual, and he’d stumbled into the kitchen, slamming his toe into the edge of the cabinet because his vision was still too fuzzy to give him a clear picture of his path. He’d reached for the blue coffee canister, and as his hand made contact with the ceramic, he remembered what it was that had been bugging him when he fell into bed a touch after midnight. He was out of coffee. He’d meant to stop on the way home from work, but he and Olivia had caught a case, turning ‘after work’ into 10:30 rather than 7. Standing there, feet bare, toe throbbing, empty coffee canister clutched in his left hand, he’d said, quite loudly, “Fuck.”

 

But the physical discomfort of cold soaked cotton also provided a welcome diversion from the mental discomfort that had kept him awake until at least 2 a.m. and returned full force approximately ten seconds after his alarm erupted with the perky drone of the traffic report. He had to admit that he loved those ten seconds. The ten seconds between the time you become conscious and the inevitable moment when whatever life shit was there when you went to sleep avalanches back down into the front of your mind. Elliot closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, an instinctive response to the image he couldn’t shake. The image of Kathy’s face when he’d told her that he was not, in fact, coming home. Ever.

 

He knew she’d believed him this time, because for the first time in two years, he’d believed it himself. But he didn’t want to think about that. He wanted to think about finding some fucking coffee and getting on with what was sure to be a shitty day. The sooner he got started, the sooner it would be over.

 

His feet smacked the sidewalk in rhythmic cadence, and he found it bizarrely comforting that at least this was something he could control. The speed of his stride, the weight of each step. Left or right, faster or slower. Ridiculous, honestly, that he was thinking about this, but given that he seemed to have no control over the rest of his monumentally screwed up existence, he figured he might as well take what he could get and enjoy the cold morning walk. Despite his reputation, he was better than your average person at appreciating the small things.

 

Maybe because he had to be.

 

He turned the corner and ducked under the awning that covered the coffee shop entrance. The rain was harder than he’d calculated when he’d glanced out the window before leaving, and he was soaked. Running his hand backwards over his scalp, he tried to push some water out of his hair before walking inside, but quickly realized the futility of his efforts and pulled the door open, holding it for a young woman who held an infant in her left arm. The baby couldn’t have been more than ten days old, and Elliot found himself staring in fascination at the little boy’s feet. They were covered in white socks with a navy blue stripe around the ankle, and everything was just so. . . small. The woman murmured “Thank you,” to which Elliot responded with an automatic, “No problem,” before following her into the store.

 

The line for coffee was long – not surprising at 7 a.m. on a weekday. Elliot assumed his place, rubbing his arms to keep himself from shivering. Tuning out the ambient chatter, he gazed absently through the glass of the front doors, watching umbrellas flash by on the sidewalk outside. Past the umbrellas, he noticed that some asshole had parked illegally, and for a moment considered going to confront the guy. However, he was tired and the idiot would probably move in a second anyway, so Elliot looked back toward the counter to see if he was making any progress.

 

The next time he glanced outdoors, the man with the illegally parked car was standing beside it, conversing intensely with a dark-haired girl Elliot took to be ten or eleven, although she was quite small, so he couldn’t be sure. Elliot’s hands stilled on his upper arms as he focused his concentration on the scene before him. Something about the man’s stance – his attitude – set off his radar, and while Elliot was entirely aware that often things like, well, people popping their gum wrong, set off his radar, this was different, although he couldn’t have explained how. The man’s entire body seemed tense, as if, unlike Elliot, he’d already had 12 cups of coffee and didn’t know what to do with the excess amphetamines. The girl appeared . . . Elliot tried to think of the right word. Not scared. Unsettled? But as he chose that descriptor, she moved forward to hug the man, and Elliot turned back toward the counter yet again, this time convinced that his job and his own family problems were about to make him start seeing sexual deviants when he watched _SpongeBob_. Not that he watched _SpongeBob_.

 

“You’re here early, Elliot. Or would that be late? I usually see you at two or three in the morning. You want your usual? There’s a really good Ethiopian blend today.”

 

Elliot snapped out of his semi-trance and cleared his throat, trying to smile at Lisa, the girl with at least 20 earrings, who seemed to work at the coffee shop every night of the week from midnight to eight.

 

“Ran out of coffee,” he mumbled, glancing outside again. The girl had backed several steps away from the man, and was now speaking rapidly and gesturing at the same time, her agitation level clearly higher than it had been only moments ago. “The Ethiopian sounds great,” Elliot responded.

 

Lisa smiled. “Two seventy-five. Or do you want that on your tab?” She turned around and filled the tall cardboard cup as she spoke.

 

“The tab would be great. I’ve gotta get to work.” Elliot shifted back and forth on his feet, suddenly needing, against his better judgment, to go outside and find out what was going on in front of the damn navy sedan that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The hazards blinked at him, rhythmic like his footsteps had been, only the opposite of soothing or controllable.

 

Lisa handed him the steaming coffee, hot against his hand even with the little protective cardboard sleeve. “Have a good one. I’ll probably see you in the wee hours.”

 

He forced a smile. “Let’s hope not. Thanks, Lisa.” With strides twice as long as the ones he normally took, Elliot hurtled toward the door and shoved it open with his free hand, moving toward the man and young girl, simultaneously trying to look as if he hadn’t noticed them at all. As the coffee shop door fell shut and choked off the noise from within, Elliot could hear tiny fragments of the conversation. He deliberately slowed himself, amazed at how difficult it was for him to move at that speed. He stopped maybe ten yards away, looking in the other direction and pretending to sip his coffee.

 

The little girl’s voice, now both angry and maybe a touch frightened: “Dad. I said no. Mom said I can come and visit in the summer, and that’s fine, but-”

 

The man cut her off, putting his large hand on the small shirtsleeve that covered her upper arm. “Meredith, you’re not getting the full picture here. There’s some stuff. . . . You need to come with me. Now. We’ll call your Mom tonight and sort it out.”

 

“No. Just take me to school. I’ve got a math test first thing.”

 

The next fifteen seconds elapsed so quickly that Elliot found himself momentarily paralyzed, unable to shape the evidence in front of him into a coherent narrative. With unbelievable speed, the man used the hand he already had on his daughter’s upper arm to shove her into the back seat of the car. At almost the same moment, he hit the lock button on his keyfob and threw himself into the driver’s seat, slamming the car into gear.

 

Elliot dropped his coffee on the sidewalk, where it splattered over his already soaked jeans and probably would have burned his legs if the freezing fabric hadn’t cooled it immediately. He ran the seven or eight strides that it took to reach the car, and caught up just as the man released the emergency brake. On full autopilot now, Elliot stepped in front of the sedan and slammed his hand down on the hood. Hard. He reached for his shield, intending to stick it in this dickhead’s face, only to realize that in his juvenile fit over being out of coffee, he’d slammed out of the apartment with nothing but his keys.

 

No umbrella. No badge. No gun.

 

As if the situation weren’t already surreal enough, the instant that the word “gun” floated through Elliot’s thoroughly confused brain, the man in the driver’s seat quietly produced a 9 mm. He held it there, several inches below the dashboard, so that it would be difficult to see for anyone driving or walking by. Then he nodded his head almost imperceptibly to the child in the back seat, trapped there by the childproof locks. He looked directly at Elliot, and something seemed to snap into place in his eyes. Elliot would have labeled it recognition, but that made no sense. With the gun, the man gestured toward the unoccupied seat in the back and mouthed, “Get in.”

 

Under certain circumstances, the number of things that can move through your consciousness when time isn’t even passing, between the tick of one second to another, defies the law of physics. Elliot’s options zapped through his neural pathways, exceeding the speed of light or sound. Run like hell into the coffee shop and call for backup. Jump in the front seat instead of the back and hope he could break the fucker’s arm before the guy could get off a shot. Yell at one of the numerous oblivious passers by to call 911. Or, get in the back seat of the car.

 

This physics-defying mental debate was pure exercise, if he was honest with himself. Stripping everything else away, it was about the dark-haired little girl, huddled in a terrified ball against the corner of the back seat, her hands clenched together until her knuckles made tiny symmetrical mountaintops. Elliot knew nothing about the nameless man staring at him through the windshield. Consequently, any choice besides compliance came with the risk that this man would hurt his daughter.

 

Elliot nodded slightly and raised his hands, palms forward, clearly demonstrating his intention to submit. He walked slowly to the back of the car and placed his hand on the door handle, waiting for the click indicating that the lock had been released. Muffled through the closed windows, he heard the man say, firmly but calmly, “Meredith, don’t move a centimeter.”

 

 _Click_. Elliot opened the door. _Click_. His ass hit the standard issue taupe scotch guard upholstery, and he barely had time to slam the door before his abductor, still clutching the gun in his right hand, hit the gas and lurched out to lose himself in the maze of morning rush hour.

 

Elliot breathed in as deeply as he could, rapidly trying to triage the priorities here. He stretched his right hand behind him to grab his seatbelt and snapped it into place, then refocused himself on the miserable shaking bundle across the car from him. She wasn’t belted.

 

He cleared his throat and said, funneling every ounce of concentration into keeping his voice level and soothing, “Meredith? That’s your name?” She stared at him silently for at least five seconds before finally nodding, just once. He realized he’d been holding his breath and exhaled, glad that the sound evaporated into a symphony of honking and tires against pavement. “I’m Elliot. And you need to buckle your seatbelt, okay?”

 

She looked down automatically, and after a moment, shifted herself a shade to the right, then did as he asked. Elliot felt an unexpected sense of relief when he heard the snap, which almost made him laugh. Having this child belted probably did nothing to make her safe in her current situation, but it had made her speak to him, and now if this asshole crashed them into a cab or something, she’d probably be okay.

 

Elliot flipped his attention to the front seat, trying to remember the rules they’d been taught to follow in abduction scenarios. _Never raise your voice. Keep your focus on the abductor’s motives at all times_. He twisted his neck back and forth, looking through the window, collecting himself. Rain continued to slip down the pane in meandering patterns, and road spray rose up from the asphalt to meet it.

 

 _Think. Just think. This asshole doesn’t know you’re a cop. Figure out what he wants and convince him that you’ll help him get it. Quickest way to get this kid out of here._ “What’s your name?” Elliot tossed out, conversationally.

 

“It’s Douglas. Mason Douglas. And yours is Stackler? Steebler? Something like that? I recognize you from the news coverage of that trial that just ended. The guy who got off even though he-” Douglas abruptly cut himself off. “Anyway. You obviously know what he did.”

 

_Fuck. So much for the part where he doesn’t know I’m a cop._

 

Douglas continued, his voice tense but controlled. “I’m not surprised that I managed to run into a cop this morning. Fits right in with the rest of my week.”

 

“Why’s that?”

 

“Long story,” Douglas replied, making a quick left turn.

 

“I’m thinking I have time,” Elliot retorted, reaching a hand up to massage the back of his neck. “And it’s Stabler. Elliot Stabler.” The coffee that now created a pale brown stain on the legs of his still soggy jeans had never made it into his stomach, and while adrenaline was currently working just fine as a stimulant, it did nothing but intensify the rapidly escalating caffeine withdrawal headache he could feel from the top of his spinal column to the back of his eyes.

 

Douglas took another turn, and as Elliot mapped out the possibilities in his head, he realized that they were probably headed for the Holland tunnel. Which meant they could be going fucking anywhere. But he couldn’t ask that question. Even though his memory was sadly fuzzy regarding the protocol for these situations, he knew (from day to day interaction with nutjobs of all varieties) that direct questions set people off. So he had to flip the switch on his natural impatience and calm the hell down. Talk to the man. Find out what was up with the daughter, why he had a gun, and what he meant by the comment about his week.

 

Elliot leaned back against the headrest, experiencing the absurd mental disconnect of being temporarily liberated by his own helplessness. For the time being, unless he wanted to attack the guy and risk killing all three of them, he had no options. The airflow from the vents in the dashboard made the heavy dampness of Elliot’s jeans even colder against his thighs. “Could you turn the heat up a little? I forgot my umbrella on the walk to the coffee shop.”

 

“Yeah. Sure.” Douglas smoothly transferred the gun to his left hand and drove with his right knee as he fiddled with the temperature controls. When he was done, he rapidly slipped the 9 mm. back into his right hand, his finger resting gently on the trigger. The safety was still on, which somehow made Elliot feel better. But only slightly.

 

“So, Mr. Douglas. What do you do?” The air was already warming, and Elliot felt the automatic contraction of his muscles ease.

 

“I’m a programmer. Used to work for the NSA. Now I’m at a private firm downtown,” Douglas answered, glancing in the rearview mirror before changing lanes. “I should be at work right now. But I’m guessing that since I’ve just kidnapped a police officer at gunpoint, unemployment shouldn’t top my list of concerns at present.”

 

Elliot couldn’t help but give a half-smile. “Can’t argue with you there.” He paused, debating the wisdom of his next question. _Screw it_. “So what’s the game plan here?”

 

Douglas said nothing for a few moments, slamming on the brakes when the driver in front of him slowed suddenly. As the car picked up speed again, he hit the radio with one knuckle of his right hand, and classical music filled the taupe fishbowl. The notes floated through the air for several seconds before Elliot recognized the melody, but he had no idea what piece it was. It occurred to him that Olivia would know.

 

 _Shit. Olivia_. He looked at his watch. 8:15. His own voice echoed in his head. _Don’t even think about going back to the precinct, Liv. I’ll be in by 7:30 and we’ll finish the paperwork first thing_. Even though they were barely speaking at this point, at least not about anything non work related, Elliot knew she’d already looked at the clock ten or twelve times. Already called his apartment. Called his cell. Thought about calling Kathy for approximately one tenth of a second, then abandoned that idea with equal speed.

 

“Still with me?”

 

“What?” Elliot’s eyes snapped up when Douglas spoke again, and he tried to summon his fractured thoughts into one place – at least temporarily crazy glue them together for a minute, even if a couple of the fragments wound up a little off-center.

 

“You asked me about my plan. You falling asleep back there or something?”

 

“Hardly. I skipped breakfast. Low blood sugar.” Elliot scratched his elbow to give himself something to do.

 

“You’re back there running the What To Do When You Or Someone You Love is Abducted playbook on me, aren’t you?” Douglas asked, and though he was clearly amused with his own attempt at wit, there was an edge to his tone. Awareness. Warning.

 

_Okay. Point for you, prickass._

 

“I must have had the flu the day we went over that in the academy,” Elliot replied evenly. “I’m just sitting here trying to figure out how we can all get out of this car without anybody being hurt. No offense, but I’d much rather be sitting at my desk drinking the coffee I dropped all over the sidewalk, than locked in this car with you and your Glock.” He paused then, aware that he was already letting the anger seep in. _You’ve got to control it. If not for yourself, for the little girl_.

 

Elliot turned his head to look at Meredith, but all he could see was a cascade of soft brown hair. Her face was pressed to the window, her body entirely unmoving, as if she had no investment or interest in the conversation swirling around her. But Elliot knew that she was hearing and digesting every syllable.

 

“I’m not going to hurt my daughter, if that’s what you’re implying.”

 

Elliot watched the sky disappear as they drove into the Holland tunnel. Douglas hit the lights before he continued. “My original plan was to take her someplace where her mother and-“ He checked himself, breathing deeply before he rephrased. “Where her mother couldn’t find us, and then figure it out from there. But now you’re here, and although as I said awhile ago, this doesn’t surprise me – given my luck of late – I have to admit that it’s gonna take me a second to figure out what to do with you.”

 

“Hey – take your time. You’re the one with the gun.”

 

Douglas’ voice was quiet. “Which I never intended to use.”

 

Elliot didn’t respond. He put his hand on Meredith’s shoulder, ever so lightly. “Meredith. You okay?”

 

She didn’t turn, move, or react to his touch in any perceptible way. After a moment she said, in a voice so flat it made Elliot sick to his stomach, “I’m great, thanks. Perfect.”

 

_________________

Olivia strolled into the 1-6 around 7:40, feeling oddly refreshed for a workday. Last night, instead of staying up until 2 reading _The Time Traveler’s Wife_ , a ridiculously addictive book that she found herself unable to put down once she picked it up (she felt vaguely ashamed every time she looked at the clock and realized she’d done it again), she had tossed her clothes in the laundry basket, washed her face, brushed her teeth, and been asleep by 11:30 for the first time in probably a month.

 

This morning she’d even taken time for a second piece of toast, and instead of doing the trick where she brushed her teeth for thirty seconds and then gargled with Listerine for two full minutes while drying her hair, she’d actually completed the dentist recommended two minutes of brushing and finished it off with a quick floss. She wouldn’t have said she was cheerful exactly, but at least she wasn’t already pissed. Given that she had to square off with Elliot over a large mound of paperwork, this was probably a good thing.

 

She dropped her coat on the rack hook and strolled toward her desk, leafing through pale pink phone messages as she slowly made her way forward. When she reached the back of her chair she finally looked up, nonplussed to find an empty seat before her, rather than Elliot in all his pissy morning glory. Olivia dropped the messages by her phone and cased the squad room; perhaps her partner was already sick of paperwork and had simply wandered off to stretch. He did that a lot lately.

 

But Elliot’s desk looked precisely as it had the evening before, when they’d walked out to deal with a rape at knifepoint. His coffee cup was even in the same spot where he’d slammed it down, garnished with a burst of jumbled profanity. She contemplated the dried brown tracks, evidence of the drips that had sloshed out due to Elliot’s vehemence, and leaned forward to observe that the cup was still over half full.

 

 _Don’t even think about going back to the precinct, Liv. I’ll be in by 7:30 and we’ll finish the paperwork first thing_. Olivia raised her eyes to the clock on the wall, the red second hand moving in jerky twists around the circular face. 7:43. He was probably stuck in traffic. Or his alarm hadn’t gone off. Or he’d gotten into it with Kathy again and was late because he felt like pouting. _Still_.

 

Olivia kicked her chair back far enough to allow her to sit down and listened to the weird compressing noise the cushion made when her butt hit the vinyl. She could hear Cragen on the phone in his office, yelling at someone, but that was certainly nothing unusual. _Still_.

 

What the hell was wrong with her? In the approaching nine years they’d been partners, how many times had Elliot been late? Hundreds? Annoyed by her own irrational inability to shake her conviction that something was wrong here, Olivia popped the lid off her tea and took a long gulp of the hot, bitter liquid. At the precise moment she swallowed, the squad room doors opened, and Fin walked in, a stack of files in his left hand and an open Coke in his right.

 

“Hey, Liv. Good thing at least one of you showed up before eight.”

 

“What? I’m early!”

 

“Yeah. But I’m earlier and Cragen’s already on the warpath. Turns out your vic last night is the daughter of some big shot at Columbia, and he’s all up the boss’ ass for info. Cap wasn’t too excited when he found out the paperwork hadn’t even been processed.” Fin looked toward the door. “Where’s your worse half?”

 

Olivia shivered involuntarily, and took another sip of tea, wondering why it was so cold in the bullpen. “Probably stuck in traffic. I’ll get started.” She slammed her drawer open so hard that it smacked her in the wrist. Biting into her lip to keep from cursing, she yanked out a pen and shoved the drawer shut again, all the while fighting the impulse to call Elliot’s cell and ask him where the hell he was.

 

She’d been attempting to concentrate on paperwork for less than five minutes when the door to Cragen’s office flew open. He stood framed in the doorway, looking even more humorless than usual. Olivia caught herself studying the clock again – the silly red second hand that seemed to jerk backwards for a nanosecond before it went forward again. 7:48.

 

“Benson. Would you be so kind as to call your partner and ask him if he plans to grace us with his presence anytime soon? I’ve got the Dean of Humanities at Columbia University on hold, wanting to know when he can meet with the detectives who worked his daughter’s case last night. I would have told him to come right down, but apparently Elliot needed a manicure before work today.”

 

Olivia tightened her cheeks and held her breath for a second to keep from smiling at the image of Elliot receiving a manicure, then said quietly, “Yeah. I was just about to call him anyway.”

 

Cragen sighed, his shoulders sagging a touch. He took several steps toward her desk and said, this time softly and with more resignation than anger, “Do that. I realize he has some stuff going on. But I’m gonna be singing soprano within the hour if I don’t have some answers for this guy, okay?” He vanished back into his office as Olivia reached for the phone.

 

 _Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring._ She tapped a pencil against the edge of her desk. “You’ve reached Detective Elliot Stabler with the Special Victims Unit. Please leave a message, or if this is an emergency, dial 911 or Special Victims directly at 212-555-4839. Thanks.” Olivia set the phone quietly into its cradle and pressed her fingertips together, trying to ignore her stomach, which felt as if she’d eaten one of the super-sized movie popcorn tubs all by herself.

 

Lifting the phone again, she dialed Elliot’s apartment. _Ring. Ring_. “I can’t come to the phone right now. Leave a message.” Beep. This time the receiver met the cradle with the sharp snap of plastic on plastic. Two rings. He’d been gone from the apartment long enough for someone to leave a message, because if his phone was message free, it rang four times. In some remote corner of her mind, it registered with Olivia that she knew an unnatural amount about her partner’s home telephone, but at the moment, she didn’t have time to pull that thought out and play with it.

 

The only person left to call was Kathy, and she wasn’t nearly desperate enough to go there yet. Despite whatever the hell was or was not going on between Elliot and Kathy, Olivia felt inexplicably convicted that if she didn’t know where Elliot was at the moment, Kathy didn’t know either.

 

She took five rapid gulps of tea, the last two burning her throat, and looked, yet again, at that second hand that by now seemed to be intentionally mocking her. It was so predictable. Never faster or slower, shorter or longer, never a brighter or duller shade of red.

 

7:56. _Fuck._

 

_________________

 

 

The Ford’s tires hummed against the road, the sound more distinguishable now that they were free of the city cacaphony. Elliot’s head pounded, and he realized that on top of needing a 452 ounce cup of coffee, he was thirsty. Unbelievably thirsty. He tried to recall the last time he’d had some water, and if he wasn’t mistaken, it would have been the sip he took from the water fountain before he walked out of the 1-6 to hit the crime scene last night. Had he been following his normal routine, he would have had a tall glass of water before he crawled into bed, but the smackdown with Kathy had made everything strange and distorted like one of those trick camera things that come on new computers. Elliot wasn’t even sure he’d brushed his teeth before falling into bed last night. So now, even more than coffee, he wanted water.

 

He glanced over at Meredith and the edges of his mouth twitched upward. She was asleep, her neck at an uncomfortable looking angle, her head slumped slightly forward, but mostly leaning against the door. In sleep, her face had lost the angry, closed off, distant expression that was the only one Elliot had observed during their very brief acquaintance. Like his own children when he went to look in on them at night, she looked peaceful, as if she were genuinely enjoying this brief break from all the shit that life handed down when you were conscious.

 

To distract himself from the thirst that was beginning to make him feel a touch insane, Elliot rubbed his palms over the slowly drying denim of his jeans and said, his voice quiet, “So what’s the problem with your wife, Mr. Douglas?”

 

The man in the front seat sighed, quickly adjusting his glasses with his left hand before answering. “Look, Elliot? I’m gonna call you Elliot. Because I was never a jock and calling you ‘Stabler’ would make me feel like a jackass, and anything like ‘Detective Stabler’ makes me feel as if you’re interrogating me. And since, as you pointed out, I’m the one with the gun, I’m going with Elliot.”

 

“Fine,” Elliot replied. He wanted to smile. The guy wasn’t entirely unlikable, save the whole thing where he had a gun and was driving them all to some unknown destination.

 

“But uh, you can call me Mason. I’m sure they tell you at your little seminars that you’re supposed to be respectful when people kidnap you. But let’s be honest. You’d blow my head off in half a second if you thought it would get you out of here. So as long as you don’t try anything, feel free to be as obnoxious and disrespectful to me as you like. It’s not going to change my plan.”

 

“You have one now?”

 

“Yeah. I have one. And that’s all I’m saying about it.” As he spoke, Douglas suddenly exited the turnpike. Elliot had never been on this road before, and as they drove, fewer and fewer cars flew past in the other direction. After another few minutes, Douglas turned again, this time down a bumpy road that looked as if it had been years since it had seen a paving crew. Chunks of asphalt caused the Ford to bounce this way and that, and Elliot wondered if Meredith would pop awake. She didn’t move.

 

Finally, Douglas pulled around a corner and into what must once have been a parking lot, but the ‘building’ that once required parking had obviously burned down years ago. Douglas stopped the car and put it in park, but left the engine running. He clicked open the doors and said, his voice shaky, “Get out.”

 

Elliot swallowed. Moronic as it seemed to him now, until this precise moment, it hadn’t occurred to him that this soft-spoken, khaki-clad, glasses-wearing Dad was capable of killing him. But now, between the shakes from hunger and caffeine withdrawal, the overwhelming thirst, and the man’s clear intention to do _something_ with him, Elliot felt nauseous.

 

He got out of the car.

 

“Stand in front of the trunk.” Douglas motioned the gun toward the rear of the car, and Elliot took several steps, slower than usual, flipping through alternate scenarios in his head as he tried to find a way to extricate himself from this colossal fuckup of a situation. Nothing came to him. He faced the navy blue of the trunk, looking at the small chips of paint that were missing from a few places, the tiny rust stain that wound around just below the back window. He heard Douglas’ hand on the keyfob, and the trunk latch released.

 

“Open it.” Douglas’ voice was steadier now, more convicted. Elliot reached forward and pushed the trunk up. “Put your hands in front of you. On the car. And lean forward a little.”

 

Though he was as terrified as he could ever recall being (for himself anyway), for the second time in less than an hour, Elliot experienced the freedom that comes with complete lack of control. He closed his eyes. Breathed. Waited.

 

The impact came, surprisingly painless. And then there was nothing.


	2. Chapter 2

But no one ever talked in the darkness

No voice ever added fuel to the fire

No light ever shone in the doorway

Deep in the hollow of earthly desires

~~~~Sarah McLachlan: I Will Not Forget You

 

________________

 

 

Since the moment Olivia walked through the doors of the 1-6 for the very first time, on a hazy, warm Monday at 7:54 a.m., she had taken a quiet but omnipresent pride in her ability to sublimate whatever was going on in her personal life and concentrate on the job. Sure, there had been the puking in the trashcan incident, and a few other microscopic (occasionally larger) slips here and there, but on balance, regardless of what events swirled into chaos outside work, she’d always been able to pack them up and shove them into one compartment of her brain – the one labeled “Other Stuff.” Then, she briskly slammed the compartment door and didn’t reopen it until she was alone, late at night, and could deal with that crap on her own terms.

 

Generally, this policy worked impressively well. Men try to feel you up because they find the idea of working sex crimes hot and kinky? Forget it. Run some LUDs. Don’t have a date for Saturday night because the very nice man you’ve stood up four times running finally told you to shove it? Forget it. Work it out on the asshole in Interrogation Room 2. Your partner’s marriage falls apart and he becomes incapable of addressing you without snarling? Forget it. Go down to the lab and talk to Warner about the toxicology report for the Joe Schmo case.

 

After awhile, Olivia discovered that instead of having to practice this avoidance skill, it became so natural that sometimes, she couldn’t even find the key to the “Other Stuff” compartment. For long periods of time, the door remained closed. So when something like the Gitano case blasted it wide open and everything wedged in there came flying out to smack her in the head, she ran. Out of the 1-6, out of the state. Whatever it took. Until she could figure out how to control that compartment again, and then she’d come back, game face intact, ready to do the work and forget the rest.

 

Because she was good at it.

 

However, by 4 p.m., as she sat at her desk, pulling the same sticky note off the yellow pad and replacing it on the little rectangular glue strip, again and again, she realized that there were certain things that wouldn’t form themselves into the right shape to be shoved into the “Other Stuff” compartment. Things like when your partner of almost nine years vanished from the planet without so much as “I think I’ll take a personal day” or “Fuck this fucking job.”

 

Until around noon, everyone in the squad room had, by tacit agreement, pretended that nothing was out of place, as if the act of ignoring the obvious might make it go away. Cragen had finally called Dr. Richardson, the Columbia Dean of Humanities, and asked him to come down and speak with Olivia. Munch prepped carefully and subbed for Elliot, pacifying the Dean and gleaning enough information that by two, they had a suspect sweating in interrogation.

 

Olivia had gone in and done her job, but even as she asked the questions that always came out of her mouth, gauged the creep’s reactions and calibrated her approach accordingly, she couldn’t help but feel as if she was reading from a script. The entire time, she felt the clock outside the room – the one in the bullpen – ticking, which was idiotic, since there was a clock in interrogation and it was physically impossible for her to hear the bullpen clock through the closed door. But she could hear it in her head.

 

The suspect was pathetically easy to break, and within ten minutes Olivia had him writing his confession while Munch looked on, studying her with an unreadable expression. The moment the dickhead signed his name, Olivia walked out, right past Cragen’s inquiring face, and called Kathy.

 

“Kathy Stabler.” Brisk. Distracted.

 

“Kathy. It’s Olivia.”

 

Pause. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

 

“Elliot. . . “ The word didn’t come out of her mouth right, and Olivia covered the mouthpiece as she cleared her throat. “Elliot didn’t come in this morning. I just thought I’d check and see if you know what’s going on.”

 

Kathy was silent for a few seconds, and the arm of Olivia’s chair emitted a grating squeak. Finally Kathy spoke, her voice thick with a mixture of emotions that Olivia wouldn’t have even wanted to attempt to label. “I have no idea where he is, Olivia. The two of us decided-“ She cut herself off and started over. “We got into it last night, but when he left he said he had to be at work early to finish some paperwork.”

 

And in that split second, with the timbre of Kathy’s concern echoing in her head, Olivia knew. Wherever Elliot was, he wasn’t there voluntarily.

 

She could hear Kathy breathing on the other end of the line, quick and panicky. “I’ll call the kids,” said Kathy quietly, when her breathing had slowed a touch. “And get back to you if they know anything. But Olivia, he wouldn’t just-“

 

“I know. I _know_. I’m going to talk to the Captain now. I’ll call you as soon as we know anything.”

 

“Same here.” Kathy disconnected without saying goodbye, and Olivia held the phone in her hand, staring at it as if it were a foreign object. Then she slammed it down and walked into Cragen’s office, without even knocking to announce her presence.

 

_________________

 

In his dream, they are dancing. It’s a huge ballroom, with polished wood floors and glisteny chandeliers hanging down from the ceiling every twenty-five feet or so, their patterns looping like gossamer spiderwebs. There’s a stage, but it’s empty. In fact, no one else is in the room. Music floats past them, waves you can’t catch, and although it’s a melody he’s never heard before, the notes do something inside his mind, recall for him a feeling so far buried he’d forgotten it was ever there.

 

That it ever existed.

 

The reason a tiny part of him knows it’s a dream is that Olivia is in his arms, closer to him than she’s ever been in real life. His arms circle her waist, and he knows he’s holding on too tight, but for some reason it doesn’t seem to bother her, because she’s leaning her head back and laughing at something he said, only he has no idea what. He can’t hear his own voice, and after a minute, he realizes that he can’t hear hers either.

 

She’s laughing, her eyes lit with a joy he has never witnessed in all the time he’s known her, and an unbearable rush of sadness and frustration engulfs him; he wonders, desperately, why he can’t hear that sound. The sound of her laughter. He wants to fucking hear. He wants it like he’s never wanted anything else in his goddamn life, and he even stops breathing to see if that’s the problem, but nothing helps. He feels his heart slamming in his chest, but he can’t hear that either.

 

Suddenly, it occurs to him that he’s taking the wrong approach here. He can’t hear her, but he can feel her. And smell her. Her neck smells like raspberries, her hair like pomegranate. Even though she’s still saying something, he pulls her closer and presses his face to hers, slipping his hands up her back where they glance off her bare shoulder blades before reaching the fine hair at the nape of her neck. And for all the times that he’s stared at her across the desk in the squad room, when she would learn forward and chew on a pencil while she worked, her hair obscuring her face, he finally has the chance to put his hands in it, to feel the way that her scalp curves just slightly where his fingertips are, the twin, symmetrical rises.

 

He wants to know more. He wants to stand here and dance with her, even though they’re more moving to music than dancing. He wants to put his fingers on all the places he hasn’t touched yet. To make a map.

 

So he won’t forget.

 

Her cheek is warm and soft and smooth and everything his is not. He puts one hand on the small of her back and one at the nape of her neck, and as he feels her ribs expanding and contracting, breathing against the weight of his arms, he curses violently at whatever deity he can conjure, because no matter how hard he tries now, the dream is fading.

 

The colors grey as the ballroom begins to shimmer and waver, and rather than the comfort and erotic pleasure of contact, there is only crippling, unbearable pain.

 

He is awake.

 

_________________

 

Olivia stood at the door to Elliot’s apartment, key in the deadbolt, palm flat against the cool wood. After three deep breaths, she twisted the lock until the felt the give and heard the click. She placed her hand on the doorknob, drawing her gun from its holster and holding it loosely, because procedure dictated that she should.

 

She knew that Elliot wasn’t in the apartment.

 

If Cragen had asked her _why_ she knew this, she wouldn’t have been able to provide an answer fortified by anything resembling logic. In theory, Elliot could be in there, shot dead by a collar with a grudge, or taken down by a heart attack caused by his random flare-ups of uncontrollable rage. But he wasn’t. She knew this. So she pushed the apartment door open and walked inside, determined to stay there until she found something – anything – that might at least point her in a direction, rather than leaving her here in a static whirlpool, where each set of words that marched through her mind ended in a question mark.

 

She noticed the silence first. Granted, she’d only been in Elliot’s apartment a handful of times, and rarely for more than five or ten minutes. But even then, there had always been the noise of him – the radio softly announcing how many more people had died in Iraq today, the coffeemaker gurgling as Casey prepped them for a court appearance. A couple months ago, right after the Sennet case, and before the combined mess of Simon and Kathy had returned their relationship to one of polite and necessary coexistence, she had come over for pizza on a Saturday night.

 

Because he’d invited her.

 

He’d even agreed to light cheese and broccoli on her side, though she’d never get through it and he’d be forced to eat the leftovers. On that night, which now seemed like a different lifetime – or perhaps someone else’s lifetime – they’d sat curled across from one another on his couch, drinking beer and laughing about office gossip, like the fact that Munch couldn’t get the new woman in crime scene to go out with him. They’d watched _Aliens_ , a film Elliot had insisted Olivia couldn’t live without seeing, and although the large-toothed slime-dripping monsters hadn’t bothered her at all, what _had_ bothered her was the realization that they hadn’t hung out like this since before Kathy walked out on him. Two years. She’d fallen asleep during the climactic final scene where the aliens start falling through the ceiling, and Elliot had teased her for weeks.

 

Back when teasing was something they did.

 

Olivia wasn’t sure why she remembered this now, as she closed the door softly behind her and let her eyes sweep across the expanse of the room, left to right. A haphazard stack of newsmagazines decorated his coffee table, next to a few empty coffee mugs. A pair of sweatpants and a black t-shirt created a slightly misshapen ball on the corner of the couch. And on the back of the chair, entirely dry, lay Elliot’s leather jacket, the one he never would have left behind if he’d intended to be gone for more than ten minutes. Not on a rainy day that had started out so cold.

 

 _Where the hell are you, Elliot?_ Instinctively, Olivia grabbed her cell and hit number one on her speed dial. Within moments, she could hear a faint noise from the bedroom. She walked quickly toward the source of the sound, and found the bedroom door wide open. The bed was unmade. A pair of boxers and navy flannel pajama pants littered the comforter.

 

It was when she finally located the phone, sitting on the dresser, that Olivia felt the first stab of panic slam into her chest cavity. Because a few inches away from his cell sat his gun, still in its holster, and his badge, shiny as it reflected the late afternoon light that slipped through the crack at the bottom of the shade.

 

Without touching anything, Olivia turned silently and retraced her steps, this time heading into the kitchen. A few barely rinsed dishes cluttered the sink, but the coffeemaker pulled forward on the counter is what caught her attention. The top was open, with a filter carelessly fitted into the basket, and the plastic indicator with the perfectly placed white marks showed that someone had filled it with five cups of water. Only a few inches away, the coffee canister stood, its top also open. Olivia peered inside, and although she couldn’t yet guess at the size of the puzzle, the first tiny piece slid into place.

 

She pulled her phone out of her pocket and dialed, unconsciously slapping her thumb against the edge of Elliot’s counter.

 

“Cragen.”

 

“It’s Olivia. I’m at Elliot’s apartment.” Her voice sounded louder than normal in the disconcerting silence that blanketed the room, but she pushed on. “You can send crime scene if you want to, but nothing happened here. He ran out of coffee and must have wanted some badly enough that he went out first thing. He didn’t take anything with him. No badge, no gun, no coat. The door was locked. He expected to be back in ten minutes.” She looked to her left and swallowed hard as she noticed something else. “There’s a clean bowl and a box of cereal next to it on the table.”

 

Cragen was silent on the other end of the line, and Olivia could hear his chair creak as he leaned back farther than he probably should have. “Okay. Okay. I’m gonna have Fin and Munch start calling the local hospitals. You go down and see which coffee shop would have been his most likely target, and see if you can get anything out of them.”

 

Olivia’s fingernails dug into the flesh of her palm as she fought to be rational, fought to remember that there could be any number of explanations for what was going on here. However, terror was rapidly trumping rationality. On his worst day, Elliot wasn’t deliberately cruel, and if were out somewhere having a beer and blowing off steam on the heavy bag, he would have called to say so, even if all she got was, “I need a couple hours. I’ll talk to you later.”

 

Straightening her back in case that might make her voice steadier, she said, “Captain, this isn’t Elliot. I know he’s been a jackass lately, but-”

 

“Save it,” Cragen retorted, his words considerably softened by his tone. “Everyone agrees that something’s up. But you know I can’t put out an APB unless we’ve got at least a tiny morsel of evidence that his mystery evaporation involves foul play of some sort.” Cragen paused, and in the silence Olivia stared at Elliot’s jacket, lifeless and immobile on the back of his chair. On their pizza night he’d tossed it to her when she started to shiver during the scene where the duplicitous asshole locks Ripley and the little girl in with the slimy baby aliens, hoping to. . . she couldn’t remember what he was hoping to do. But she remembered Elliot’s jacket, warm across her arms and shoulders, smelling of that piney aftershave Kathleen had bought him for Christmas.

 

“I know. I wish we could. . . “ The irritating beep of her call waiting cut her off. She pulled the phone away from her ear far enough to glance at the display. She didn’t recognize the number. Probably one of the hundreds of vics to whom she had given her card, with instructions to call if they ever needed to talk. She put the phone back to her mouth. “Forget it. I’ve got another call. I’m on my way to the nearest coffee shop. I’ll call you if anything turns up.”

 

“Fine. You know you’ll be the first to hear if anything changes.”

 

Cragen disconnected and she walked toward the door, her thumb depressing the answer button as she moved.

 

_________________

 

When Elliot slowly began his ascent from the subterranean haze of unconsciousness, his senses returned sequentially, rather than simultaneously, which probably would have been highly disturbing if his brain had been functioning well enough for him to realize what was happening. But given that his mind was still floating in the otherworld, halfway between total darkness and full sensory awareness, he lay quiet and observed as the various parts of him regained functionality.

 

Touch before anything. Pain, everywhere and nowhere, so intense that he didn’t know its location, and searching for it hurt even worse. Consequently, he settled for letting the pain wash over him in rhythmic waves, waiting for the next sense to activate.

 

Taste. The distinct impression that his tongue was made of sandpaper, that there wasn’t even enough lubricant in his mouth to swallow, because you can’t swallow nothing.

 

Hearing appeared next. Wind, blowing sharply through the trees, and while large portions of Elliot’s mind remained entirely nonfunctional, he somehow knew that the trees were pines. Water, not rushing, but rippling or trickling, maybe over rocks or against sand.

 

Smell. He breathed deeply, observing that at least his chest cavity was pain-free. Air, of a quality so different from that in the city that it randomly touched off a memory. Accessing said memory took awhile, but Elliot had yet to regain any sense of time.

 

Every summer for five years running, starting when he was about seven or eight, his uncle had taken him and three of his cousins camping in the Adirondacks. No matter how hot it was in the city, nighttime in the mountains was cool and magical. Elliot remembered waking up one night and looking at the sky, wondering how any place on earth could be so free from the sounds of human beings. The air smelled like pine, like the leftover embers from their campfire. And in the woods he could hear the rustling and nestling of foxes, squirrels – god knows what else.

 

He’d gotten out of his sleeping bag and walked down to the edge of the lake, and even though the water was freezing, he’d sat down and stuck his feet in, just up to the ankles. A minute or so later, he heard his uncle’s soft footsteps, so different from his father’s. Gentle. Slow. Measured. Loving. Uncle Jack sat down beside him and stuck his feet in the lake, too, the ripples traveling silently out toward the charcoal expanse of water, stirred only by the wind. And after a few minutes, his uncle had said, his voice thoughtful and somehow far away, “Elliot, I want to ask you something. It’s a rhetorical question. You know what that means?”

 

“No.” Elliot sighed, wondering what the heck his uncle was talking about.

 

Uncle Jack laughed. “Didn’t think so. It’s a question that you don’t have to answer. You’re only supposed to think about it. So don’t tell me the answer, even if you know, okay?”

 

Elliot shrugged, perplexed. “Okay.”

 

“If you could have one thing – one thing in this entire world, what would it be?”

 

Elliot had stared out across the lake, to the other side where the trees were so far away that, particularly in the leftover moonlight, they blended together into a uniform evergreen mass, and he’d thought that his uncle must be nuts. What kind of stupid question was that?

 

Now, struggling to pull himself up, knowing (though he wasn’t sure why) that he needed to force himself back into reality, it struck Elliot that his uncle’s unexpected question might be the smartest thing anyone had ever asked him.

 

________________

 

The first thing Elliot thought when he finally opened his eyes (sight being the last sense to return) was that if he didn’t get something to drink within the next millisecond, he was destined to kill himself or someone else. The second thing he thought was that he must have one hell of a concussion, because even though light poured through the opening of wherever the hell he was (he couldn’t focus well enough to identify his surroundings yet), everything appeared to be sideways. The third thing he thought was that he didn’t dance, and since when did he have dreams about waltzing with Olivia in a fucking ballroom with spidery chandeliers? The fourth thing he thought was that while his head felt five sizes too large and throbbed like a son of a bitch, it was quite possible that his right ankle hurt worse, and he wasn’t sure why. He would have kept counting, but for some reason he couldn’t remember which number came after four, so he stopped and decided to breathe for a minute.

 

Thirty seconds passed. A minute. Gradually, Elliot’s surroundings swam into focus, and he realized that he was in the trunk of the Ford, the trunk he’d been standing in front of when Mason Douglas hit him with something very hard, most likely the butt of his gun. The trunk was open maybe six inches, tied down with a bungee cord. Elliot moved his hands and his legs, verifying that he wasn’t bound, and after another minute or two, took a deep breath and forced himself into a sitting position, releasing the cord to push the trunk the remainder of the way up. When he was sure it would stay there and not hit him in the head, he let go.

 

Everywhere he looked, there were pine trees. He wasn’t a Boy Scout, but from the slant of the shadows, he guessed that it was late afternoon or early evening. The car was parked at the end of what he guessed could loosely be classified as a road, but it more closely resembled a very narrow dirt path that would barely have passed for a walkway if it had been a few yards narrower.

 

As Elliot moved to massage the back of his neck, sliding his fingers upward to find the impressive knot at the base of his skull, he heard something crinkling on his chest. He looked down, moving his head very slowly, and saw that a yellow sheet of paper – the legal pad kind – was fixed with masking tape to the front of his now sweaty t-shirt.

 

Rubbing a dusty knuckle into his still blurry right eye, Elliot squinted until he could focus. Scrawled in black ink, the handwriting barely legible, it read:

 

_Elliot –_

_I apologize for the head and the ankle. If it helps at all, I used to be an EMT, and I broke it clean, so you can get patched up when you’re back in civilization and there won’t be any permanent damage. But you’re obviously in good shape and I can’t have you walking out of here before I get where I’m going. I drained the gas tank, too, but the battery’s new, so it will work for awhile if it’s cold at night._

_There’s a six-pack of water and a bottle of Advil in the back seat. I would have left you some food, but I didn’t pack any. I’m a drive-through guy myself._

_Good luck. Sorry it turned out this way, but there’s a lot about my situation you don’t know and don’t need to._

_Mason_

 

“Motherfucking son of a bitch!” Elliot yelled, his words vanishing practically before they’d left his mouth. Well, at least that explained what had happened to his ankle. He leaned forward and pulled up his jeans to take a look, quickly shoving them back down. His foot slanted at an unnatural angle, and the surrounding tissues were already spilling into angry shades of red and purple.

 

Okay. Okay. Water first. Then he’d work out the rest. Using his arms to lift himself, Elliot hoisted his body out of the trunk and landed carefully on his left ankle. Once he was upright, although the pain in his head still rendered him irritatingly dizzy and every now and then made him wonder if he might vomit, he managed to inch and hop his way around the back of the car, bracing himself against the vehicle as he moved. Finally, sweating despite the fact that each minute brought both the sun and the temperature lower, he reached the back seat, pulled open the door, and collapsed inside.

 

Douglas had been true to his word, and Elliot laughed out loud at the absurdity of the picture presented by the pristine six pack of water and the small white bottle of Advil. He ripped off the plastic packaging, yanked out a bottle, cranked the top off so fast that it hurt the skin on his palm, and drank the entire thing without taking a breath. When he was done, he sat gasping for a few seconds before realizing that he hadn’t taken any of the medicine. He tapped four liquigels into his hand and popped them all into his mouth at once before unscrewing another bottle, more gently this time, and taking a few small sips, just enough to get the medicine down. Now that the psychotic need for water had subsided, it hit him that since he had no clue where he was or how he might notify anyone of his whereabouts, it might be intelligent to ration the liquid.

 

Elliot leaned forward, his fingers on his temples, wishing like hell he’d paid more attention back in the day, when Uncle Jack had gone on and on about which plants were edible and which ones would kill you. Elliot had always been off in space, thinking that he wanted to go swimming or fishing or climb one of the huge trees until he got so high up he could see all the way across the lake.

 

Yet each moment he wasted on this unnecessary stroll down memory lane put him closer to total darkness, and one thing he _did_ remember from those summer camping trips was exactly how dark darkness could be. So if there was anything helpful to be found in this damn car, the time to search for it was now, despite the still suffocating pain in both his ankle and his head.

 

He began systematically, patting his hand over the flat area behind the back seat, until his fingers met up with the window. Nothing there. He jabbed his fingers into the crevice at the bottom of the seatback, and dragged them the length of the car, but he encountered nothing except goldfish crackers and Cheerios crumbs, three sticky tubes of variously colored lip gloss, and exactly forty-seven cents in change.

 

Lifting the floor mats, he moved his hands through the dirt and grime that had congregated there, coming up with nothing more than handfuls of sand and more remnants of unidentified food products.

 

Time to move to the front seat. He repeated the procedure he had followed when he got out of the trunk, amazed by how much more the ankle hurt when he was upright rather than sitting. However, the Advil was slowly making its way into his bloodstream, because the pain no longer came accompanied by flashes of acute nausea, and he could breathe through it without much difficulty now.

 

Elliot released the lever to pull the seat all the way back, smiling at the fact that Douglas must have been at least four inches shorter than he was, or in any event had very stubby legs. He felt under the driver’s seat and looked in the console between the seats, coming up with nothing but a bunch of classical CDs. Figures. The guy couldn’t even leave him some decent Clapton or Springsteen. Asshole.

 

Next he tackled the glove box. As Huang’s profile of Douglas probably would have predicted, the only things inside were the owner’s manual, proof of insurance, and a little notebook with a pen clipped to the silver spirals that held it together.

 

His stomach began to burn, and while Elliot tried to convince himself that it was only because he’d taken a shitload of Advil without any food, he knew he was lying. There was nothing here. He sighed, leaning over toward the passenger seat just to be thorough. He bent over and stuck his hand underneath, reaching as far back as he could. He pulled out an empty box of Nerds and tossed it aside, and then the tips of his fingers made contact with something cool and metallic.

 

It was so far underneath the seat that the slight push from Elliot’s fingers had only shoved it back further, so he repositioned himself and reached again. This time his hand closed around the object, and he straightened up, silver spots appearing in his field of vision as the blood rushed from his head. He leaned back for a split second, then looked down at his right hand.

 

He was holding a cell phone, and not a cheap one. A cell phone that probably had GPS, Internet, and all those things he’d never learn how to use even if he owned a phone this fancy.

 

_Calm down, Stabler. The thing might not even be in service. He might have a new one and just forgot to get rid of this model. Or you might not be able to get service in the middle of wherever the hell you are._

 

He pushed the power button to see if the phone would turn on, wiping his free palm on his finally dry jeans. The sweat from his other hand made the phone slick as he waited to see what would appear on the display. He’d never before considered how long it took a phone to go through the motions of turning itself on, but the wait was excruciating as he watched the little “Welcome to Verizon” screen and heard the perky little chimes that meant _something_ was happening, but he didn’t know what.

 

And then. There they were. The bars. Well, bar. It fluctuated between one and two. But it was something. Praying though he didn’t realize he was doing it, he dialed Olivia’s number.


	3. Chapter 3

The wind can blow cold, it moans and it cries

When it carries the sound of a thousand goodbyes

But if you listen tonight on that high, lonely plain

You'll just hear my voice as it calls out your name

You'll just hear my voice as it calls out your name

~~~~Emmylou Harris: Waltz Across Texas Tonight

 

________________

 

 

Olivia punched her thumb into the answer button, clicking over to call waiting. “Benson.” She moved forward as she spoke, reaching for the door.

 

“Liv?” A funny crackle played with the connection, and although she was convinced that she had to be hearing things, her body went entirely still.

 

“Elliot?”

 

“Yeah. It’s me.”

 

“Shit. Are you-“

 

“I’m fine. Liv. I’m fine.”

 

For a second, she wondered if she was going to cry. She turned around and slammed her back into the door with such force that the bone at the base of her neck made a snapping sound, and she knew she’d have a bruise there within minutes. Not that she cared. A sensation she couldn’t classify rose up in her so quickly that she felt sure her body wasn’t large enough to contain it all, and she had the incongruous image of this nameless shapeless thing exploding all over Elliot’s apartment, leaving fragments sticking to his walls and peeling off his ceiling. _Stop it. Right now. Ask him questions. Everything you can think of._

 

She breathed in, and for the first time since that morning, her lungs felt as if they might have expanded fully. When she finally thought the noise coming out of her mouth might be comprehensible, she said, “What happened? Where the hell are you?”

 

He laughed on the other end of the line, but even with the crappy connection, the sound of it made her scalp feel tingly; he only laughed that way when nothing was remotely funny at all.

 

“Yeah.” Elliot cleared his throat. “Where am I? Good question. I see a lot of pine trees and hear water. That’s about all I can tell you.”

 

“What?” Olivia felt as is she’d just woken up from one of those never-ending dreams that contain nothing but random, unconnected twists and turns, and you lie there trying to reconcile the various elements, but no matter how hard you try to put it together, you can’t match the pieces; none of it makes any sense.

 

“Elliot. Start from the beginning. Are you hurt?”

 

The first part of his sentence was lost in fuzz, but she got, “-decent concussion, and my right ankle is broken. Hurts like a son of a bitch. Aside from that I’m fine.”

 

Olivia rubbed her forehead with her free hand. “Okay. Then just tell me.”

 

Elliot paused, and she could envision him, the look on his face as he assembled his thoughts. For all the times he spoke (because as anyone who had experienced the misfortune of being trapped in an interrogation room with him would tell you, he was hard to shut up when he got on a roll), they were outnumbered at least ten to one by the times he didn’t, and as Olivia waited for him to begin his explanation, she realized how many times she’d decoded his face over the years. How many times she’d saved him the bother of transforming his thoughts into words. But with nothing but the now sweat covered cell phone in her hand, language was the only implement that remained.

 

She tried not to think about how much they sucked at verbal communication.

 

His voice drifted over the line, and the relief that came with knowing that at least at present, he was okay, drained her adrenaline so abruptly that she slid down until she was sitting on his beige carpet, her back still jammed painfully against the solid wood of his door.

 

“I ran out of coffee,” he began.

 

“Yeah, I noticed.” She smiled just a touch. “I’m at your apartment. Cragen has Fin and Munch calling the fucking hospitals.”

 

“Well I’m sorry!” he shot back. “I’ve been a little unconscious for who knows how long. Couldn’t exactly check in.”

 

“Sorry. Okay. No coffee.” She bit her lip to silence herself as he continued.

 

“And Kathy and I-“ He stopped. “Anyway, I was pissed off, so I slammed out of the apartment with only my keys and went down to Java Central to get the biggest cup I could find.”

 

He paused again, trying, she was sure, to make this as condensed as he possibly could. His words continued to drift through the phone, finding their way into her mind in muddled scraps and pieces. _Short version. Asshole. Daughter. Was gonna drive off. No badge. Gun. Made me get in_.

 

Yet even as she did her best to absorb the import of what he was relating to her, she closed her eyes and let the hum, the rhythm of his voice (which she’d always taken for granted – a constant in her life like shitty bullpen coffee), quiet the psychotic pulsing in her head that hadn’t stopped for a second until she’d pushed that button on her cell and heard him say her name.

 

“Shit.” Olivia opened her eyes and gazed out the window, watching the deepening blue of the sky and willing the entire day to start over. From the top. The alarm at 6:30. What had it been playing? Hotel California? Take It To the Limit? Something Eagles. It annoyed her that she couldn’t remember.

 

“He went through the Holland Tunnel and got on the Jersey Turnpike. After another couple turns we ended up in the former parking lot of some burned down building. He made me stand in front of the trunk and cold cocked me. I woke up in the trunk a little while ago.”

 

Olivia pushed the tips of her fingers into Elliot’s carpet until there were five round beige indentations. There was a brownish stain a few inches away from where her thumb was planted; she thought Elliot probably didn’t have any Resolve. “How’d you wind up with a cell phone?”

 

“I think that was this asshole’s only oversight. I found it way under the passenger seat. He must have meant to take it with him, because he thought of everything else. Drained the gas tank and broke my ankle so I can hardly move.”

 

Thoughts coursed through Olivia’s mind so swiftly that she couldn’t filter them at all. _The phone. It has to have GPS. A locator of some kind_.

 

“Elliot. Does the phone have GPS?”

 

“The guy didn’t hit me that hard,” he retorted. “I already tried. It’s there, but it doesn’t work. I thought it might relate to the signal, but that doesn’t make sense, because I can hear you fine even if the connection breaks up every now and then.”

 

“Okay.” Olivia pushed herself up. Her knees felt funny and she tasted blood from where she’d bitten into her lip. “I’m gonna hang up and call TARU – let them know what’s going on. Then you can call in. They’ll get a trace and pinpoint your location that way. Do you remember the number or have something to write it on?”

 

Elliot thought for a second, because he wasn’t sure. His head throbbed, and the hunger had become so severe that connecting thoughts now required focused effort. But it came back to him. “I remember. I’ll give you a few and then call.”

 

He stared out through the open window, watching the dusk vanish. Within an hour, it would be too dark, at least until moonrise, to see the trees that were only yards away. The air was cooling, and for the hundredth time since walking out of his apartment that morning, he cursed himself for being so intent on proving – well, whatever the fuck it was that he had been trying to prove – that he’d left without a jacket. He wasn’t going to develop hypothermia, but between his head, his ankle, the absence of food, and the falling temperature, he wasn’t going to be comfortable either. On the upside, the lack of water meant that he didn’t have to get out to pee.

 

“You still there?” Her voice was shaking.

 

Elliot clenched his free hand into a compact ball. Until it hurt. Her voice was _shaking_. He wanted to be there. In the same room. Just to look at her, so she’d know. Even in the waking nightmare of the warehouse with Gitano, he’d been able to look at her. He’d done nothing _but_ look at her, because he couldn’t say anything that so desperately needed to be said. But now, it was only her voice. His voice. The spaces between. He didn’t know if he was thinking about miles or something else.

 

“Yeah.” He wanted to laugh at how entirely inadequate that response was in comparison to what he should have been saying. _I’m sorry I’m such a jackass. I’m sorry I screw with your emotions like a fucking blob of Play Doh, but I don’t do it on purpose. I’m sorry I said I was going back to Kathy, because I’m not. I’m just. . . fucking sorry._ Which is what he was. Sorry. Particularly so because he didn’t say any of those things.

 

“How much battery does that phone have left? Can you tell?”

 

Elliot squinted at the LCD that illuminated the rapidly descending darkness. Squinting made his head throb even more, but he scanned the display face until he saw the little lines that had to be the battery indicator. Two of the four bars were lit, but as he looked, one evaporated. _Nice_. “It’s um, about half, I think,” he lied.

 

The truth seemed pointless.

 

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Then you need to use it as little as possible. Call TARU in five minutes. I’ll hit the coffee shop and be back at the precinct the instant I’m finished.”

 

“No problem.”

 

Through the partially cracked window, Elliot felt a gust of wind, colder than he would have expected. He put his thumb on the end call button, but didn’t push it. He could hear Olivia breathing, faster than she should have been. Suddenly, he blurted, “I don’t want to hang up.”

 

“I don’t either,” she responded instantly. The picture of Elliot’s apartment that had been perfectly clear a second ago clouded before Olivia’s eyes, and she swallowed forcefully against the knot that expanded in her throat like one of those stupid foam dinosaur pellets kids love to stick in the tub. Munch kept them at the precinct – stuck them into cups to entertain the kids, and Olivia had no idea why she thought of this right now. Anything to avoid the moment that was approaching, when she’d push the button and even his voice would be gone.

 

“El?” She jammed her fingertips into her eyes until they hurt.

 

Somehow he knew what she was going to say, and he steeled himself against it, his muscles contracting, because he didn’t want to lie, but God did he not want her to know the whole truth right now either. Unbidden and even more unwelcome, her face replaced the darkness in his visual field. Her eyes fixed on his as they sat, both inches and miles away, in the grey fabric chairs outside Rebecca Clifford’s hospital room. _What about me_?

 

“Yeah. What?” He made his voice as light as he could, praying that she only wanted to know if he’d brushed his teeth that morning or something.

 

“Do you have anything to eat? Anything?” Her voice held hope like one of those Mt. St. Helens ash ornaments Kathy’s mom sent every year to decorate their Christmas tree. Now he got to smash it into tiny, useless shards. But he had to. He’d already lied once, and even that one he’d have to retract, probably within minutes.

 

“No. There’s nothing.”

 

“You’ve looked through the entire car? Trunk? Glove box? Everything?”

 

“Liv.” His voice was low. Soft.

 

“Sorry. Stupid question. I just wish-“

 

She fell silent. Gripping the phone, warm against her ear, she let her eyes wander around Elliot’s apartment one more time. On this trip, she noticed something she hadn’t before. Sticking out from in between a couple of his _Newsweeks_ was a photograph. She had actually observed it peripherally the first time she cased her surroundings, but had quickly discounted it because all she could see was him, dressed up and smiling the way you smile when some asshole demands a photograph and you brutally detest having your picture taken. Nothing out of the ordinary. But this time, she realized that she recognized the suit. She walked three short paces to the coffee table and pulled out the picture, her body quiet and still as she stared at the photograph.

 

The hidden half was her. They weren’t even touching – in the picture. It came back to her now. Some higher up’s retirement party, a few months ago. What she did remember was this: Not the moment captured by the picture itself, but the one just after. The tiny second after the flash, when there were still purplish yellow spots in her eyes and Elliot’s hair looked as it had been decorated with tinsel, a thought which, in combination with the three huge margaritas she’d knocked back, had amused her at the time.

 

What she remembered was the way his smile, the one for the camera – the frozen, obnoxious, cheesy, “I’d hit you if I weren’t remembering my manners for tonight” one – had given way to an expression far more complex, disturbing, and unsettling. Oh, right. And intoxicating.

 

Probably that most.

 

For a portion of time so brief that until this moment, staring at the evidence, she hadn’t been positive it had even happened, his smile had metamorphosed into something completely different. Something dark, scary, complex, loaded, and irresistible. Because she wasn’t smart enough to look away, she’d held his gaze for a little too long. Almost instantly, they’d both gone flushed and started talking over one another in choppy sentences, her about the Williams case and him about how he had to call and make sure Maureen was back from her date, and everything had gone back to exactly the way it was before.

 

Elliot’s voice sliced into her reverie. “I’m gonna hang up now. I’m. . . “ He paused. “I’m down to one battery bar.”

 

“But you said-“

 

“I know what I said. Stupid. I figured you were worried enough. But you’ll hear it from TARU anyway, after I talk to them.”

 

“Elliot.”

 

 _Shit._ He’d heard her voice sound like that maybe three times in his life, and each one had made him want to hit something so hard and so repeatedly that he didn’t have any skin left on his knuckles. He pressed his right foot into the floor, deliberately sending rhythmic stabs of pain up his leg. Anything to externalize what hurt. Put it someplace where he could touch it. Physical pain was fine with him, but he wasn’t sure how much longer he could deal with all the baggage Olivia somehow managed to pack into one fucking word.

 

“Don’t do this now. Don’t. I’ll be fine without food for a few days. You know that. I’m hanging up. Call TARU to let them know what’s going on. I’ll talk to you soon.”

 

He disconnected before she could say another word, before he had to listen to that sound anymore. He sat in the driver’s seat, very still, until suddenly the back of his neck was prickly and cold. He shoved the door open just in time, vomiting violently as he leaned over the dirt. He retched again and again, savoring the horror in an odd way, because twisted as it was, he’d rather retch than cry.

 

________________

 

At 8:37 p.m., or so the wall clock bearing a strong resemblance to the bullpen model (the one that was quickly becoming her nemesis) informed her, Olivia walked into TARU, holding the surveillance tape from the coffee shop in her left hand. She’d expected to find Fin, Munch, Cragen, and probably even Lake down there, but there was only Morales, peering intently at his monitor and typing so fast that his motions seemed to defy the laws of physics. He looked up when he heard her, and said, “Olivia. Cragen will be back in a second, but Fin and Munch are on their way to pick up Elliot.”

 

“What?”

 

“He called in and we got the trace with no trouble. He’s in Newark. I was even able to narrow it down to a specific address. Elliot kept insisting that we were insane, but the signal’s clean.”

 

Olivia extended her hand to grip the back of a chair, not sure if she wanted to scream, cry, or go smash her head into a concrete wall. Perhaps all three. “He’s not in Newark.”

 

Morales studied her quietly for a second. “The Captain guessed you’d say that.”

 

“Well that’s perceptive of him. I tend to say things when I know I’m right,” she snapped.

 

Morales didn’t reply, and she sighed. “I’m sorry. It’s not-“

 

“Don’t apologize. Everybody wants to figure out where Elliot is. It’s fine.”

 

Olivia heard footsteps behind her and risked releasing the chair to turn around. Cragen approached, one hand already extended to fend off her tirade.

 

“I know what you’re going to say, Olivia, so don’t waste the time.”

 

“He’s not in Newark. He’s not. Which means that every moment we spend driving all over creation to find out what I can tell you standing right here is another moment we’re not figuring out where he actually is.” Both the pitch and the volume of her voice rose steadily as she spoke, causing Cragen to wince slightly by the time she was done.

 

“You finished?”

 

“No.” She stared at him, on the verge of tears or something worse, wanting only to go someplace where nobody would be able to see how close to the edge she was, but simultaneously aware that, until they found Elliot, she would never get a moment alone to open up the Other Stuff compartment that currently felt so packed it pressed painfully against the inside of her skull.

 

“Well. Get finished.” Cragen jammed his hands into his pockets. “I’m not saying he _is_ in Newark. We’ve got no choice but to eliminate the possibility that we’re reading the signal correctly, and there’s no other way to check.”

 

Olivia squeezed the back of the chair again so that she wouldn’t kick something. Like Cragen, for example. “Yes. There is. Ask Elliot.”

 

“By his own admission, he has a concussion. He’s probably dehydrated and certainly under severe psychological stress. You’ve seen hallucinations show up with less provocation!”

 

“He’s not hallucinating,” she muttered, but all the urgency was gone from her voice. She’d lost this round and she knew it, so she leaned forward and handed Morales the tape from the coffee shop. “Here’s the surveillance video from when this guy took off with Elliot. I stopped to pick it up after Elliot called and told me where this whole thing went down. There’s probably not a lot of information on there that he didn’t already give me, but it might at least have a clear picture, so we have an idea of what the guy looks like.”

 

“On it,” answered Morales, popping the tape into a machine to his left.

 

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” said Cragen quietly. “I’m gonna get George down here to work up a profile on this guy – see if that can help get us some answers about what he might have done with Elliot.”

 

“If he’s not in Newark, you mean.” Olivia’s sarcasm-saturated voice hung in the air.

 

“Shut up, Benson,” Cragen shot back, his voice surprisingly harsh. “You’re not the only one around here who wants to know what the hell is going on.”

 

He stalked off before she could reply, and she threw herself into the chair that had been supporting her for several minutes, wondering what it would be like to have the power to suck back words like a vacuum cleaner tube attachment – retract them before they reached their intended target. Since she wasn’t likely to metamorphose into a vacuum cleaner within the next few minutes, she leaned forward and concentrated on the image Morales had brought up on his screen.

 

The grainy video replayed events exactly as Elliot had recounted them to her on the phone. The blue Ford. Elliot holding coffee. The rising tension between the man and his daughter. As the video hummed forward before her eyes, Olivia noticed that, while she should have been staring at Mason Douglas, studying his demeanor and his actions for anything that would give them some direction, she couldn’t stop looking at Elliot.

 

Regardless of how bad the video quality was, she knew the moment Douglas produced the gun, although the angle of the shot didn’t even bring the weapon into view. It was the change in Elliot’s eyes, visible to her even on crappy VHS. The way his expression shifted from cocky determination to reluctant resignation.

 

Neither she nor Morales spoke as he rewound the video and started again, typing here and there, working on enhancements to sharpen the picture and the sound.

 

Olivia ran a fingernail down the arm of her chair. She looked at her hand, experiencing the strange sensation that it belonged to someone else, that it had nothing to do with her. Her fingers were trembling, and as she thought for a moment, she realized that she hadn’t eaten for almost twenty-four hours, unless you counted the few tablespoons of milk she’d poured into her tea before everything went all to hell that morning. She should eat. The miniscule part of her that still functioned on logic knew this. However, she wasn’t positive she could get anything to go down, and if she were honest, she found it comforting to know that she and Elliot were equally hungry.

 

“Olivia.” She started as she heard George’s soft voice behind her, ashamed that she’d entirely forgotten about the tape as her mind darted off without her permission.

 

“Hi George,” she said, suddenly painfully aware of the exhaustion that seemed to flow through her like a living substance. “What do you have?”

 

George pulled out a chair and sat down across from her. He had that look in his eyes, the one that telegraphed he was about to say something soothing, and she cut him off before he could emit a syllable.

 

“Don’t. Don’t sugarcoat anything. Don’t try to make it better than it is. Right now what I need is to hear the truth, because if I don’t, I think. . . “ She trailed off, unable to be sure exactly what her voice was doing.

 

George smiled, but the offensive look vanished immediately. “Fine,” he said evenly. “The truth.”

 

He crossed his legs, collecting his thoughts. For a second Olivia thought she might reach out and smack him, but she squeezed her fingers and thought about how none of this shit was anyone’s fault, and by that time he was talking.

 

“I had to pull some strings with the FBI, but I verified at least part of what Elliot told you. Mason Douglas graduated from MIT in 1981, with a double major in math and computer science. He has post-graduate degrees from Harvard in computer science and physics. He worked for the NSA for ten years – just quit a few months ago. Obviously I wasn’t able to learn much about the nature of the work he did for them, but he undoubtedly possesses the capability of jamming a cell phone signal or making it read as if it’s coming from a different location.”

 

George paused, glancing at the screen, where Morales still sat, motionless except for the dizzying flashes of his fingers as they danced across the keyboard. “I’m with you on this one, Olivia. Elliot’s not in Newark. Even the small amount of information I’ve been able to gather on this man tells me that he’s probably got twenty or more IQ points on everyone in this department. He’s not going to take a cop and leave him in an urban area, where even with a broken ankle, the cop would be capable of finding help within minutes.”

 

This time Olivia thought she might hug him, but she didn’t do that either.

 

George continued, and she knew that, as he seamlessly informed her of his profile on Mason Douglas, he was also profiling her, reading her signals so he could tell the Captain just how close she was to losing it. An icy wash of fear slid from her temples down her spinal column as she considered the possibility that if her control slipped an inch too far, Cragen would send her packing. At least to the crib. She rearranged her face into as much neutrality as she could summon, and listened to George’s irritatingly soothing voice.

 

“If everything Elliot told you is true, which I’m inclined to believe, it’s clear that this man is not violent by nature.” George leaned sideways to pick up the cup of coffee he’d brought with him, and took a swallow. “He had multiple opportunities to hurt or kill both Elliot and his daughter, and he took none of them. He injured Elliot only enough to incapacitate him, and demonstrated empathy and concern by apologizing for those injuries and leaving the water.”

 

He twisted the thin red and white coffee stirrer in a circular motion, and Olivia found herself half mesmerized by the motion. She was that tired.

 

“What I don’t know,” George said, his voice a bit louder this time, “Is how to figure out where Douglas might be headed. We haven’t been able to locate any family members yet, although some of my FBI contacts are working on it. Douglas has lived in New York City since birth, but he could also have connections in the Boston area, because of his schooling.”

 

“Perfect.” Olivia pressed her fingers together until her knuckles cracked. Before she could say anything else, she heard the doors slam open, and Cragen barreled in, his face indicating within milliseconds what she had known all along.

 

“Munch called. The target location was a sex shop at the edge of Newark’s red light district. I think it was called Suck and Blow. Can’t say the man doesn’t have a sense of humor.” Rubbing the back of his neck so vigorously that Olivia idly wondered if it hurt, he said, “Munch and Fin are on their way back now. You know we had to try.”

 

“Yeah,” she whispered, shooting a glance at the screen before her eyes flitted back to Cragen. She silently absorbed the full effect of his appearance – his bloodshot eyes, the almost grayish cast of his skin, the way his fingers clutched his coffee cup unnaturally tightly. And she was amazed to find that instead of rage, hysteria, or any of the other emotions she had expected to feel when Cragen returned, everything inside her had mysteriously distilled into one sharp, hard, uncompromising feeling.

 

Abject terror.

 

________________

 

 

In the back seat of the Ford, Elliot sat sideways, his back pressed against the door and his right foot elevated slightly, propped by the ledge the door created just under the window. Maybe it was all in his head, but having the ankle a little higher seemed to take the edge off the pain. He held the second bottle of water in his left hand and sipped at it every minute or so, mindful that while he needed to prevent himself from getting so thirsty that dehydration made him start vomiting again, he also had to drink the absolute minimum to keep himself in shape. His stomach had settled down for now, although not to the point where he dared to take any more Advil without food.

 

 _Shit. Food._ He wanted to think about anything but food. Unfortunately, being out in the middle of nowhere conjured nothing but memories of every possible thing one could cook by a campfire. S’mores, hot dogs, roasted marshmallows, baked potatoes encased in shiny silver foil, releasing huge puffs of steam the moment you burned your fingers trying to unwrap them. This was _not_ a track his mind needed to be on, given that he could already feel the shaky lightheadedness that resulted from low blood sugar.

 

_Think about something else, asshole._

 

To divert himself, Elliot closed and opened his eyes, again and again, attempting to find contrast but astonished at how little difference it made. In the city, darkness was merely a word, an abstract concept that people used to differentiate day from night. Here, darkness had physicality. You could reach out and touch it, and sometimes, it felt almost as if it were moving around, rearranging itself into shapes and patterns that shifted and waved whether his eyes were open or closed.

 

He’d left the window open a crack, because he wasn’t yet cold enough to risk wasting whatever battery the car had left to heat himself up. Outside, he could hear the soothing sound of water rippling and splashing, the wind flowing back and forth through the pines, and the wildlife out there doing whatever it is that animals do in the woods at night. Maybe he should have been a damn Boy Scout.

 

Inside, what he heard, as vivid as if she were right there in the rippling blackness, was Olivia’s voice saying his name. The way she’d said it when she realized that he had no food and no way to get any.

 

 _Elliot_.

 

She’d probably said his name thousands of times over the years. _Elliot, could you hand me the Michaelson file? Elliot, remember not to get extra cheese this time. Elliot, stop being such an ass. Elliot, would you talk to me? Elliot_. Just Elliot. With Gitano.

 

But no matter how many times she’d said it, right now he couldn’t hear any of the others.

 

 _Elliot_.

 

Concern. Fear. Desperation.

 

Love.

 

But since that last one was number one on the Top Ten List of Things Elliot Stabler Is Never Supposed To Think About, he shook his head, regretted it instantly when the nauseating pain smacked against the base of his skull, and went back to visions of gooey hot marshmallows, stretching in curvy strings as they stuck to his fingers.


	4. Chapter 4

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in

~~~~Leonard Cohen: Anthem

 

________________

 

 

In Olivia’s third year of college, she’d taken a class in relationships and ethics. On the first day of class, as she sat there staring at the faint blue lines that formed neat rows cascading down the sheet of paper before her, Professor Walter had asked them to spend five minutes imagining in detail what life would be like without the person they valued most.

 

Even the word “value” pushed Olivia off center, because although she felt both love and gratitude toward her mother, she’d never exactly thought about valuing Serena. However, since Serena was the only obvious choice to use for this exercise, she’d let her eyes unfocus and tried to take the assignment seriously. By the time the five minutes were over, Olivia wanted to get up and walk out of the classroom; she’d concluded that even if someone had custom designed The Worst Daughter On The Planet, this creation would have nothing on her.

 

The reason she felt so guilty was basically this: virtually all of the changes she imagined were positive rather than negative. She wouldn’t have to worry about her mother’s drinking, about all the possibilities she lived with every day when she was at school and Serena was home, stumbling through life on her own, sometimes more successfully than others. She wouldn’t have to deal with the random flashes of anger, the unpredictable moods, the personality changes that struck like lightening, but without the rumble of thunder to offer a friendly warning to take cover. She wouldn’t have to look into her mother’s eyes and wonder, for the hundred thousandth time, whether the sadness, bitterness, defeat, and anger she so often saw there were her own fault or the fault of life in general, relating to her only elliptically.

 

Yes, she would have missed the morning coffee she and Serena sometimes shared. The occasional evening in the summer when she’d come home to find Serena unexpectedly sober, holding out a new pair of earrings she’d bought at a craft fair on campus, because they’d look nice with Olivia’s new turquoise skirt. She would have missed the way her mother smelled, the way she still brought medicine, soup, and whatever else was necessary if Olivia was sick. She might have longed for the surprise postcard she’d sometimes find in the mail, most often the plain white ones (though every now and then with a scenic nature photograph, or a city by night, if Serena had recently attended a conference), but covered with Serena’s impressively beautiful handwriting and discussing such normal, ordinary things that Olivia almost forgot the unassailable monolith that always existed between them.

 

She concluded that excepting her grief, her life without her mother would remain largely unchanged. She would still keep any emotion of consequence to herself. She would still treat human relationships like interesting science experiments, safest and most informative when observed from an objective distance, with a lens you could adjust for clarity.

 

Now, as she sat at her desk, twisting her thumb and forefinger into a napkin that read Imperial Garden (Where the hell had those come from? They usually got takeout from Hunan Hamlet.), Olivia wanted like hell to believe that this particular trip down memory lane was random, popping in from nowhere because she’d walked by someone who wore the same cologne Professor Walter had worn, or because she’d glimpsed a rack of scenic postcards on her way in to work.

 

She knew it was a lie.

 

She remembered because she was doing the exercise again, only for hour after endless hour instead of for five minutes, and this time she didn’t have to pretzel her definition of value at all to apply it to the person in question.

 

 _Thud_. Something landed on Olivia’s desk, and before she could turn her head to find out what it was, she heard Casey’s voice, grumpy but still filled with combative energy.

 

“I figure you’ve probably dropped your no coffee rule, so I brought you a twenty ounce mocha java.” Casey sank into the chair next to Olivia’s desk, rolling her head back and forth for a moment before she added, “But I also brought egg salad. Which you’ll eat.”

 

“Casey, I don’t-“

 

Casey leaned forward, irritably rubbing the back of her hand over her right eye. “I didn’t say you’d want it. I said you’d eat it.”

 

Olivia eyed the plastic-wrapped sandwich skeptically, but picked it up anyway, gingerly pulling at the place where the wrap made a lumpy raised line.

 

Casey grabbed it almost immediately. “Let me do it.” She peeled the plastic back until the corner of the triangle stuck out, then handed it to Olivia without comment. Olivia took a bite, trying to remember that this wasn’t about indulging the melodramatic impulse to starve herself until she found Elliot. It was about doing whatever it took to stay in the game, whether she liked it or not. As if to prove it, she took another bite, bigger this time, and chewed it quickly, grabbing for a large swallow of coffee to lessen the chance that the eggy clumps would stick in her throat.

 

Casey ate several bites of her own sandwich before she suddenly glanced down and shoved her pumps off. “Stupid shoes,” she said, her voice muffled by chicken salad. “Wore them all day and I lost anyway.”

 

“Sorry,” Olivia replied automatically, her mind still miles away, conjuring snapshots of life without-

 

“You know I’m not here to talk about _my_ crappy day.” Casey rested her sandwich on the napkin at the edge of the desk and looked directly at Olivia, her exhausted face radiating concern.

 

Olivia nodded, still engaged in combat with bite number seven. She thought she was probably winning. “When did you hear?”

 

“Probably about ten seconds after Cragen put out the APB,” Casey answered, tipping her own coffee cup back. “Lots of bored people at the courthouse eagerly waiting to fill me in on the latest.” She swallowed some more coffee and studied Olivia for another second before she said, “Can I do anything? You look like crap.”

 

Olivia sighed. “Thanks. I’m okay.”

 

Casey shoved the last bite of her sandwich into her mouth and wiped her fingers, silently watching Olivia’s face. “You’re a shitty liar.”

 

Olivia dropped what was left of her sandwich. It rolled over once before coming to a stop, leaving a tiny smear of egg salad on the desk. “What do you want me to say?” Her voice rose unnaturally, and she forced herself to bring down the pitch. “We’ve got nothing. George is working his FBI connections, trying to get anything he can out of them, but he hasn’t had much luck so far. The APB’s out, but since we have no idea what this Douglas guy is driving, that’s of limited value, especially at night. So we sit here drinking coffee and eating sandwiches while Elliot is out in the middle of nowhere with a snapped ankle and a six pack of water.”

 

Ignoring the jab entirely, Casey asked, “What about the warrant for the guy’s residence? Tell me you didn’t hit a judge who turned you down. I’ll get on the phone right now and-“

 

“Of course we got the warrant.” Olivia stared at her desk, tracing a figure eight on the surface, the wood firm and smooth against her fingertip. “Cragen, Fin, Munch, and Lake are there now.” She paused, rubbing at a crescent of water damage, then said softly, “Cragen wouldn’t let me go.”

 

“Oh,” Casey replied, and while Olivia kept expecting her to follow up with something, apparently the statement didn’t require clarification, because she just took another sip of her coffee and leaned forward to scratch her ankle. The bullpen was so quiet that Olivia could hear Casey’s fingernails against the fabric of her stockings.

 

Finally Casey slipped her feet back into her shoes, mumbling a curse under her breath as she stood up. “Liv.”

 

Olivia lifted her eyes, wishing that Casey would stop looking at her that way. “What?”

 

“I’m not the only one who doesn’t buy your act. That’s why you’re here.” Casey paused to toss the remnants of her dinner in the trash. “And you know that if you suddenly do feel like talking, you can call anytime. My cell’s on.”

 

“I know. I do. Thanks.”

 

Casey grabbed her briefcase. “I’m leaving. You’ll be the only one here. You’ve probably got several hours before they finish sweeping this guy’s apartment. So call him like you’ve been wanting to since the moment you hung up last time. It won’t fix anything, but you’ll feel better if you know he’s still okay.”

 

Olivia felt that lump she detested swell in her throat, and for a second she thought she might argue. Instead she said, “Yeah. I’ll call.”

 

Casey nodded as if Olivia had just confirmed the outdoor temperature. “I’ll be back to check in before court tomorrow, since I know you’re not going home. At least try to nap in the crib for a second, okay?”

 

“I will,” Olivia replied absently, already drifting away again.

 

“I did mention that you’re a shitty liar, right?” Casey shook her head. “Night.”

 

“Night, Case.” Olivia listened as Casey’s heels tapped a pattern down the hallway, fainter and fainter, until their click was replaced by the insidious and unrelenting tick of the clock. As if she needed to be reminded that time moved forward whether they did or not.

 

She reached for the phone.

 

_________________

 

In the back seat of the Ford, arms hugged tightly to his chest, Elliot dozed. Under any other circumstances, pure physical exhaustion would have pulled him instantly into a motionless, dreamless sleep. But between the night air (which kept him just a few degrees too cold), the pain in his ankle, and the fact that his mind wouldn’t stop concocting increasingly ridiculous and implausible ideas to get him out of this mess, his sleep remained fitful and jittery, filled with confusing, unconnected dream fragments.

 

First he dreamed that he was hang-gliding, which could have been fun, except that although he was outdoors, there was a giant light bulb that some unseen power continually flipped on and off. When it was off, he hurtled through darkness with no idea of his altitude or what was in front of him. When it was on, the light was so bright that it reflected off everything in his path, creating shapes where none existed and obscuring others that blocked his way.

 

Suddenly he was eating dinner with his family, but even though he and Kathy were apparently their current ages, and Kathy was pregnant (because she made them keep the broccoli in the kitchen so she couldn’t smell it), the kids were all about ten years younger. Elizabeth and Dickie still sat in boosters and ate with their fingers, and Kathy was calmly discussing how they could work out a custody arrangement that involved mint chocolate chip ice cream on alternating Tuesdays and something about making sure that Dickie’s t-shirts were size 4 and not 4T. When his uncle Jack walked into the room dressed in full fishing gear, the phone rang. Elliot got up from the table to get it, but the room fuzzed as the phone continued to ring in his ear. . .

 

Elliot’s eyes shot open. He sucked in a breath of cold air, looking around jerkily as he tried to figure out where the noise was coming from. Reality detonated in his consciousness all at once, and although it still hurt his head to move quickly, his eyes darted here and there, searching for the small stab of light from the phone’s LCD. He noticed a glimmer under his right knee and grabbed for the cell.

 

“Hello?” His voice was rough, and he coughed once, trying to clear everything out.

 

“It’s me.”

 

At the sound of her voice, his whole body relaxed, and he leaned his head back against the cold plexiglass of the window behind him. “Hey. You sound like hell.” He lifted his right leg up a touch higher; it had slipped during his nap, and his ankle throbbed again.

 

“You should talk.” Olivia wiggled the wooden coffee stirrer back and forth through what was left of the brown liquid in her cup, watching as a few renegade grounds floated up to the surface. “Were you asleep?”

 

“Sleep would be an exaggeration. I dozed off a little.”

 

“You’re supposed to stay awake when you have a concussion. You _know_ that, Elliot!” The tone of her voice was so hesitant, so unsure, so unlike the take-no-prisoners quality he took for granted. His palm tingled with the desire to put his hand on her arm, gently squeeze her skin beneath his fingers, and let her know he really wasn’t as bad off as she seemed to think.

 

But he couldn’t.

 

The implacable frustration that was becoming his constant companion flared up again, almost corporeal, and for a second he amused himself by picturing an animated frustration blob sitting in the front passenger seat, keeping him company while he sat on his ass like a useless piece of shit and waited for someone to come and rescue him. He could name the blob um, Bart. God. He was losing his mind.

 

“Elliot?” Shit. Now she sounded _really_ uncertain.

 

“Liv. Stop. I can’t exactly call 911 I take a turn for the worse, so I don’t think it matters whether I’m asleep or awake. I’m glad you called. I just keep losing my train of thought.”

 

“You okay?”

 

“I’d be a lot better if someone brought me a cheeseburger and a Coke with some beer battered fries.”

 

Olivia said nothing, but he could hear the sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. _Note to self. No mirth. Especially about the fact that you don’t have so much as a stick of gum to chew on._

 

“I’m fine. Really.” He chose not to mention the vomiting incident, partly because it would only freak her out more, and partly because he felt fine now, save the sensation that his stomach might cave in on itself any second. He shoved the thought of cheeseburgers out of his mind and looked out the window in front of him, past the tiny sphere of illumination provided by the rectangular cell phone display. “What’s going on there?”

 

“Not enough.” Olivia kicked one of her shoes back and forth underneath her desk. “Cragen, Fin, Munch, and Lake are over at Douglas’ apartment. George came in and gave us a profile you probably could have written, although his was G-rated. I’m sitting here enjoying my first cup of coffee in nine months because Cragen wouldn’t let me go with them.”

 

“What kind?”

 

“What kind of what?” she retorted.

 

“What kind of coffee?”

 

“It’s mocha java, Elliot. Who the hell cares?”

 

“Just asking. We probably shouldn’t be on the phone anyway now that we’ve established that I’m fine.”

 

“Yeah,” she answered. But she didn’t hang up.

 

Elliot smiled in the darkness. “You ever been camping, Liv?”

 

She leaned her head sideways until her neck gave a satisfying crack. “Depends on your definition. In college one of my girlfriends invited us to her parents’ log cabin on Lake George. I went in a canoe though. And caught a fish I had to throw back because it was like three inches long.”

 

“That’s fucking pathetic, Olivia.”

 

“Shut up. Not all of us want to get thousands of mosquito bites and skip bathing for a week straight.” She closed her eyes and pressed her hand to her forehead, struggling not to cave in to the hysteria she could feel swelling somewhere in the center of her spinal column, just waiting for the right moment to slither up and suck the life out of the last rational places left in her brain. It struck her as so perfectly _them_ that this inane conversation was simultaneously more talking than they’d done in weeks, and yet so much _less_ talking than they should have been doing, given the circumstances.

 

As if he’d heard her thoughts, Elliot said quietly, “Did you talk to Kathy?”

 

“Of course. Each time we find out nothing, I give her a call.” Her sarcasm floated out in waves, smacking the copier and the file cabinets before vanishing into the empty bullpen.

 

“We had a fight.” Elliot clenched his fists, trying to decide how much of this he could do without being able to look at Olivia’s eyes, knowing that he’d have to guess at her reactions, and she at his.

 

“She said something about that,” Olivia replied, deliberately vague. She’d be damned if she was going to ask him. Even now.

 

“I’m not moving back,” Elliot blurted, shooting a glance into the front seat to see if the frustration blob was having a good chuckle at his total lack of finesse. Out of the blue, Elliot wondered if he would ever have gotten a woman to marry him if it weren’t for the serendipitous coincidence of Kathy getting knocked up. He was pretty much the opposite of smooth. Even in high school he’d wondered if there was some secret book handed out to certain guys by The Powers That Be – the book that told you how to interact with women without making a complete ass of yourself. His statement still lurked in the air like one of those comic book speech bubbles, but he was determined not to add anything until Olivia responded.

 

“Why not?” she asked, and again he closed his eyes, wishing with everything inside of him that he could have this conversation face to face. He’d planned it that way, lying awake in bed after the fight with Kathy. Planned how he’d explain all of this to Olivia, and it had all made perfect sense then. But even though less than 24 hours had passed, the entire mess seemed so ridiculous and confusing to him that he didn’t even know where to start. Back to the part where he needed the manual.

 

_Because something won’t let me, and I don’t even know what it is, but it’s so huge and relentless and unforgiving that every time I try to make myself go back, it’s like I’m bashing into a wall, and I’m tired of fighting. Fucking tired. So I stopped._

 

But he couldn’t say that, since they didn’t do that kind of stripped down honesty anymore, so he paraphrased. “Lots of reasons. It’s just not going to work.” He pushed himself harder against the corner of the car, the night air growing more frigid as the minutes ticked by.

 

“I’m sorry, El. Really. I’m sorry.” Olivia didn’t notice her hand gripping the phone so tightly that her knuckles had gone white. She tried to breathe, but the air didn’t go all the way down.

 

“We’re doing the right thing,” he answered, and as the words slipped out of his mouth, he suddenly understood why even with the extreme unpleasantness of the exchange with Kathy ringing in his ears, he’d gone to sleep last night with the sense that the atmosphere in his bedroom somehow didn’t weigh as much as it had for two years running. He nestled the phone between his ear and his shoulder, reaching for his water bottle and taking a sizeable swallow before he tried to speak again. “Anyway. I didn’t mean to tell you like this. But I wanted you to know that it was a done deal before any of this shit. I don’t want you to think-“

 

He stopped.

 

“Think what?” Olivia relaxed her hold on the phone, but only because she’d clutched it for so long that her hand cramped.

 

“Nothing. Forget it. I just wanted you to know.”

 

Olivia heard the faint sound of voices and the smack of shoes on stairs. “Shit. I have to go. Cragen told me to call you and check in, but I think I’ve been on a little longer than checking in would require.”

 

“Probably,” Elliot replied softly, wishing like hell that the phone’s battery power were infinite, that all of their resources weren’t slowly slipping away. The phone. The water. The time.

 

Her voice a whisper now (she didn’t know if it was because she didn’t want Cragen to hear, or because a whisper was all she could get out), Olivia said, “I’ll call you as soon as I can. Be sure you remember to take sips of water at regular intervals. I know you. You’ll try to ration it too much. We’re going to get you out of there, Elliot. So don’t go all macho and dehydrate yourself, okay?”

 

“I won’t.” He said it so simply, like a promise, and she knew instantly that he wasn’t placating her this time.

 

“Good. Bye.”

 

“Bye, Liv.” He ended the call and sat without moving, his eyes absorbing the artificial brightness of the LCD, the funny image of a synthetic sunset. After half a minute, it went out, leaving him back with the darkness and the intermittent hoots of owls passing by.

 

_________________

 

Olivia spent the last ten seconds before the doors slammed open trying to collect herself, anything to make sure she appeared as calm as possible. She ran her fingertips over her lower eyelids, clearing away mascara and any moisture that might have mysteriously collected there. She straightened her back, slipped her feet into her shoes, and placed her palms flat on the desk, spreading her fingers evenly to create symmetry, forcing herself to take long, even breaths. After about three of them, she reached for her lukewarm coffee and drained the last couple ounces in a few monstrous gulps.

 

By the time she heard the doors open and Munch’s amused voice saying, “You’re trying to tell me that a former employee of the NSA suddenly developed such an aversion to computers that he declared his home a technology free zone?” she could only hope that she didn’t look like a deer before the headlights. God knows she felt like one.

 

Cragen stopped next to her desk, jamming his hands into his pockets and looking as if he’d rather have rectal surgery without anesthetic rather than say whatever was about to come out of his mouth. “We found-“ He abruptly changed his mind and started in a different place. “Did you call Elliot?”

 

“Yeah. He’s fine,” Olivia replied, trying not to sound guilty. “The ankle hurts a lot and he’s hungry, but aside from that there’s nothing new.”

 

“Okay. Okay.” Cragen leaned back on his heels and glanced toward his office, as if maybe a fire-breathing dragon would burst forth and create a distraction impressive enough to prevent Olivia from demanding more information.

 

“What’d you find at Douglas’ apartment?” Olivia asked, swiveling her chair slightly.

 

No dragon materialized, but Cragen still didn’t say anything.

 

After a second, Munch stepped forward and said dryly, “The Captain is uncharacteristically tongue-tied because we found almost nothing.” He shook his head. “It should be illegal to have a living space that antiseptic. Completely removes all the personal flavor.”

 

“Could you get to the point, John?” Olivia envisioned herself at the gym, covered in sweat, pedaling the stationary bike faster and faster and faster. She stopped this particular mental excursion when she realized how appropriate to the situation the image was.

 

“Sure,” Munch replied, unphased by her hostility. “We brought back some files and sealed the residence, in case we need to go back, but after sifting through all this guy’s crap, we agree that there’s not much worthwhile here, if anything.”

 

He nodded to the stack of files that Fin had dropped on his desk. “We’ll spend the rest of the night going through those to see if we’re wrong, but more or less, it looks like financial information of the most excruciatingly boring kind. All eerily organized, so it shouldn’t take long to sort out.”

 

Olivia squeezed her fingers into the sides of her chair. “What were you saying when you came in? About computers?”

 

“That’s the strangest part,” answered Munch, strolling the few steps to his desk and taking a seat. “There’s not a single piece of computer equipment in the man’s apartment. Nothing. No laptop, desktop, external hard drive, flash drive. Not even any of the miscellaneous cords that usually come with computers. The only surge suppressor in the place is hooked up to his DVR, which is a very nice model, I might add.” Munch leaned back in his chair, his fingers linked behind his head. “He’s got a 47 inch LCD television, but no computer? I don’t buy it. For some reason, he cleared the place out before he left.” As if to emphasize his point, Munch added, “Even I have a computer.”

 

Fin snorted, looking up from the file folder he was sifting through, page by page. “From 1998.”

 

“Not the point,” Munch replied, reaching forward to grab a file from the stack on Fin’s desk. “The equipment was there. He took it, and then made sure to get rid of all the trace evidence.”

 

“This is all fascinating,” interjected Cragen, who seemed to have recovered his voice. “But even if you’re right, we wouldn’t know where to start looking for the stuff. Focus on what we have. I want all three of you on those files immediately. I’ll even make you a pot of coffee.” Fin couldn’t suppress a muffled snicker, which Cragen ignored. “Olivia. My office for a minute.” He turned his back and walked off without further comment.

 

Olivia looked at the clock. 12:43 and um. . . she watched the red hand lurch forward. Thirty-four seconds. She shoved herself reluctantly out of her chair, her feet dragging like a pissed off four year old’s, because she knew exactly what he was going to say. When she stopped a few paces from his desk, Cragen said wearily, “Close the door and sit down.”

 

She pulled the door shut, the abrupt _slam_ louder than necessary, but also perversely satisfying. “I don’t want to sit down.”

 

“Well stand up then.” Cragen sat quite still, studying her, but she’d seen that look often enough to know that his mind was made up, and no temper tantrum she could throw was going to unmake it.

 

“Look.” He opened a bottle of water and took several long swallows before recapping it and sitting it on the corner of his desk. “You know that Hendricks gave me a full report after the mess you and Elliot made with the Marsden case in Jersey. I didn’t talk to either one of you then, because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the information.”

 

He paused, and Olivia’s conviction that she knew what was about to come out of his mouth, so strong only moments ago, wavered and fluttered as she stared at him.

 

“We don’t know when we can get to him, Olivia. Nobody wants to say that out loud, but that’s the truth.”

 

“I know,” she said softly.

 

“When we spend those few cell minutes he has left checking on him, he doesn’t want to talk to me, or Munch, or Fin. He wants to talk to you. What he doesn’t need is you, so strung out, hungry, and sleep deprived that you can’t even carry on a conversation. I think we can agree he has enough to worry about?”

 

Olivia said nothing, looking straight ahead of her at the pattern etched into the back of a picture frame decorating Cragen’s desk.

 

“I’ll take that as a yes,” said Cragen. “Munch, Fin, and Lake can easily handle the files. I want you in the crib for three hours. That’s not a request. And if you can’t do that much, I’ll send you home. You know I could justify dismissing you from this case in a sentence or less.”

 

“Fine. Three hours. I’m going.” She exited his office without looking at him again, and kept her eyes straight ahead of her all the way through the bullpen and out the door. As she took the stairs to the crib, she made sure that each impact of her shoe on the dirty stairs was twice as loud as necessary; she wished it felt as gratifying as it sounded.

 

 

_________________

 

In her dream, everything is dark. Not the kind of dark where it’s difficult to see things and you trip because objects in front of you blend with air, carpet, and furniture.

 

Black. Impenetrably black.

 

But that’s not the strangest thing. The strangest thing is that the darkness doesn’t seem to make any difference. She walks around the bullpen, opening file cabinets, talking to Munch about the Capwell case, getting Elliot more coffee, neatly filling out paperwork, all without the benefit of what is generally considered the most important of the senses.

 

Then she’s at a crime scene, and it’s not until Elliot says, “Hey Liv. Come take a look at this,” that she realizes something has changed. She can’t move at all. The sense of her own location in space, so finely tuned only moments ago, is gone, replaced with a suffocating terror and nauseating vertigo if she even tries to lift her foot.

 

Hoping that it will go away, she takes a tentative step toward the location of Elliot’s voice, but instead of the crunch of dirty asphalt on the bottom of her shoe, she’s pitched forward into empty space. She keeps falling and falling; she’d scream if she knew how, but her body isn’t responding to commands.

 

The sound of Elliot’s voice has vanished.

 

She lands, but instead of the crushing impact she anticipates, she’s on what feels like a cotton sheet covering one of those foam-topped mattresses. In the unrelenting darkness, she breathes in, and she smells Elliot before she hears or feels him. The piney cologne like his jacket. Like his couch. Like his chair at work when he’s just walked off.

 

Like his bed, which is where she seems to have landed.

 

She’s still terrified from falling, and her heart races so fast and so hard that she can feel it in her eardrums. A split second later, Elliot’s hand is on her chest, right where her heart is, and his voice floats from nowhere into her ear. “Hey. You’re fine. Breathe. I’m right here.”

 

“It’s dark,” she says, as if that two-word statement can sum up this hallucinatory mess.

 

“I know,” he replies.

 

And then everything is gone. His hand. His voice. His smell. His bed. She’s falling again, only this time it doesn’t stop.

 

_________________

 

Olivia awoke with the gross-smelling crib blanket she’d carelessly tossed over her clutched viciously in her hands. Sweat filmed her skin; she felt a bead roll slowly off her forehead and soak into the hair at the edge of her face. She breathed in short, staccato gasps, but once she recognized her surroundings, she slowly released the scratchy synthetic blanket and concentrated on slowing her respiration rate.

 

The crib door was partially open, and the half-light from the hallway threw an angular shadow on the ceiling above her. She looked at it for a long time, studying the details of its contours. So long that she didn’t even notice when the sweat dripping into her hairline was replaced with tears.


	5. Chapter 5

'Cause I scraped away the peeling paint

And found the wood was good and strong

And I found a firm foundation

Had been there all along

There's nothing here that a little work

And time can't heal

'Cause everything underneath is real

~~~~Peter, Paul & Mary: 24 Green Street

 

________________

 

 

In the third year of their partnership, Elliot and Olivia lost a coin toss to Munch and Fin and wound up on what still held the record for the longest continuous stakeout in SVU history. Seventeen hours in a silver Chevy Lumina parked in the middle of Bumfuckville, Central New York. They’d turned off a gravel covered “road” around 4 p.m. and somehow wedged the car into a tiny gap in the wall of trees, a vantage point from which they could see their suspect’s cabin, but he couldn’t see them.

 

It was two days before Christmas. Elliot was supposed to be home, wrapping presents, making construction paper chains with the kids, and helping to buy stocking stuffers. Kathy called only once the entire time and stayed on the phone for less than half a minute. Just long enough to remind him to pick up the little packs of Gummi bears before he came home -- and maybe some bubble tape. But not sour apple because Kathleen hated it.

 

The weather was freezing. They sat looking and feeling ridiculous in full winter gear -- down coats, gloves, hats, snow boots, etc. They had to leave the windows cracked to keep the car from fogging up, but they couldn’t turn on the heat because it would kill the battery. Outside, a foot deep covering of snow blanketed the landscape; Olivia remembered thinking that snow was never quite that white in the city.

 

For the first few hours they talked at intermittent intervals, tossing out random comments linked only by the weird synaptic connections that inspired them. He’d laughed about how pissed off Kathy was going to be when he finally got home. How he’d have to wrap every last present by himself on Christmas Eve, while she sat in bed drinking decaf with Baileys in it and watching _Miracle on 34 th Street_, and it would take so long that he probably wouldn’t even make it into bed. She’d asked him what they’d gotten each of the kids for Christmas. Somehow they’d segued into subjects as varied as the reasons for nuclear proliferation, the fact that commercials no longer used the kind of catchy jingles that had been omnipresent when they were kids, and theories as to why the door to the crib was the only one in the precinct with a permanent squeak, which seemed ironic or at least a bummer.

 

When the twenty-four ounce cups of coffee they had been savoring, sip by sip, were finally gone, and they’d both snuck out to pee behind a tree, they’d had this exchange, which for some reason Olivia remembered in Technicolor detail:

 

 _“Get some sleep, Liv. I’ll watch for a few hours and then we can switch_.”

 

 _“I’m too bored to sleep.”_ [pause] “ _I’m gonna have to kill you for losing the toss. I told you to pick heads.”_

 

 _“I always pick tails.”_ [grinning] “ _It works with my life philosophy. What’s your suggestion to kill time?”_

 

[sarcastically] “ _Twenty questions_.”

 

But they’d played. For hours. Elliot had told her about the lengthy games of twenty questions he’d played on camping trips with his Uncle Jack and his cousins. The game had finally come crashing to a close when they’d gotten into an epic battle over whether or not a platypus was a mammal. Olivia insisted that it was, while Elliot swore otherwise, and when they’d returned to civilization and looked it up, she’d made him buy her coffee for a solid two months.

 

As the night wore on, after even the moon had vanished (but it wasn’t quite dark, due to the shimmering reflection of the snow), they’d gone quiet. The animated conversation and occasional bursts of laughter had been replaced by lengthy stretches of soft, companionable silence. Every half an hour or so, she would say that the stupid boots were hurting her feet, or his stomach would give a loud grumble and he’d say that they should have brought more trail mix. But mostly they just sat, content in a way neither of them had given any thought to at the time, because it was so normal and expected and unremarkable.

 

Olivia had finally fallen asleep as the sky began to lighten, casting constantly moving sparkles onto the snow. She’d awakened a few hours later with Elliot’s now ungloved hand on her wrist, warm on her skin in the tiny space where her coat had pulled up. “Liv. Come on. I think he’s got the girl with him.”

 

And just like that the magic bubble had popped, the clicking of their safeties bringing the real world instantly back into annoyingly sharp focus. They’d apprehended the perp with anticlimactic ease, after all that endless waiting.

 

When Olivia finally crawled into bed around midnight and realized that it was officially Christmas Eve, she had gone to sleep without giving the events of the stakeout a second thought. It never occurred to her that not for one second in that entire seventeen hours had she felt uncomfortable, stupid, self-conscious, or worried that she might say the wrong thing. She’d just sat there, being herself, being comfortable. Maybe that was why, almost six years later, she still recalled the stakeout so vividly that she could smell the coffee on Elliot’s breath, see the vapor spiral through the air as he exhaled on a laugh (when had they stopped laughing?), hear his voice saying, “A platypus is not a fucking mammal!” and feel the pads of his fingers on her wrist as he tried to wake her up quickly without scaring her.

 

Now, still fixated on the abstract polygon of light that decorated the ceiling, Olivia wondered when the ease that had existed between them since pretty much the moment they met had vanished. But maybe that was the problem -- vanished wasn’t the right word. Vanished connoted the idea of something you could see one minute and not the next, and whatever the hell had happened with her and Elliot wasn’t like that at all. Had she actually been able to pinpoint the instant when they had started fumbling over sentences in front of one another, looking away quickly because their eyes revealed too much, and fighting because it was easier than confronting the vastness of the gulf that now stretched between them, she would probably have had some clue as to how she might address the problem.

 

But the effortless camaraderie hadn’t vanished. It had eroded. In little chipping increments, barely noticeable at the time. When Lorna Scarry told her about Elliot’s separation before he managed to mention it on his own. When she surprised the shit out of herself by snapping at him about Rebecca Hendricks. A thousand other seemingly insignificant moments. One evening when -- for the first time in over six years -- he left without saying goodbye. A long night a week or so afterwards when she refilled her own coffee cup but (even though she had no idea why she was being so petty and ridiculous) left his sitting empty on his desk.

 

She’d winced a few minutes later when he’d actually tried to take a sip, and she realized that he’d assumed the coffee was in there.

 

Olivia’s maze of thoughts (she couldn’t say train – too linear) dispersed as she heard soft footsteps coming down the hallway, followed by the predictable creak of the door’s hinges.

 

“Shit,” Casey whispered, instantly arresting the door’s movement with her hand. “Why doesn’t someone put some WD-40 on this thing?”

 

“Elliot tried once a couple years ago, I think. Didn’t work. I’m not sleeping anyway,” Olivia answered tiredly, pushing the blanket fully off her legs. She was still shaky and sweaty from the dream.

 

“I didn’t figure that you were,” Casey retorted, padding across the room and plopping herself at the foot of the bed where Olivia reclined. “I couldn’t sleep either. So I came back. I brought cards. How about gin?”

 

Olivia sighed, taking in Casey’s appearance. Her hair was pulled back in a haphazard ponytail. She wore a UCONN sweatshirt that was at least three sizes too big and yoga pants with a hole in the knee.

 

“You look like you just got out of bed,” Olivia commented. She sat up slowly, leaning back and stretching halfheartedly. “And I’m not playing cards. I couldn’t concentrate if I tried.”

 

“It’s 3:30 in the morning, Liv. I did just get out of bed.” Casey pulled her ankles toward her until she was sitting cross-legged and began to shuffle the cards. “We’re playing. If you can’t concentrate, so much the better. I’ll just kick your ass. I’m still pissed off about losing today. Especially to that McKinnon dickhead. Shane McKinnon. What kind of name is that? Sounds like a fucking romance novelist.” Her voice softened. “You can’t just sit here and stare at the ceiling. We can talk about breakfast cereal or celebrity DUIs. I just. . . didn’t think it was good for you to be by yourself.”

 

“How’d you know I was by myself?”

 

“I have an above average IQ.” Casey stopped shuffling the cards for second. “Doesn’t take a genius to realize it was only a matter of time before Cragen sent you up here.” She slapped cards into two piles on the ragged blanket. After a minute she picked up one of the stacks and handed it to Olivia.

 

She accepted the cards, the cool waxy rectangles more comforting against her fingertips than the cheap synthetic fibers of the department-issue blanket. She automatically began to sort the cards by number and suit, a tiny portion of her consciousness devoted to the diminutive clovers and hearts, while the rest of her drifted miles and miles away.

 

Olivia drew a card from the pile, slipped it into her hand, and discarded another. “Cragen’ll be pissed off if he finds you in here. I’m supposed to be napping.”

 

“I’m terrified. Really. And he’s not gonna find me here anyway. I snuck a peek into the bullpen and he’s knee deep in the paperwork like everyone else.”

 

They lapsed into silence, broken only by the quiet click of cards smacking against one another. Olivia discovered that even with the Other Stuff compartment of her brain so tightly packed that she felt her hours of sanity might be numbered, something about the logical progression of the game -- the idea of having a clear set of unbreakable, infallible, comprehensible rules -- calmed the emotional typhoon spinning faster and faster in her mind.

 

She also thought, as she held a card between her fingers, about the way that this game reflected life, although of course the analogy was imperfect. Still, each time she made a choice, kept or discarded a card, there was the flip side. The choice she hadn’t made. The card she hadn’t kept. She’d played gin enough to know how often you got to that point in the game where you looked at your hand and realized, _If only I’d kept the eight of diamonds, I’d have gin right now._

 

“It’s your turn.” Casey’s voice mercifully sliced into Olivia’s pseudophilosophical musing.

 

“Sorry.” Olivia grabbed a card and stuck it into her hand without even looking at it, discarding one with equal inattention.

 

Casey picked it up, dropped another card on the pile, and said, “Gin,” fanning out her cards for Olivia’s inspection.

 

“I trust you,” said Olivia quietly, pulling her knees up to her chest.

 

Casey raised an eyebrow. “You suck. It’s no fun to crush you if you don’t even _try_ to win.”

 

“I can’t, Casey. I tried. I just-“

 

“It’s okay. I know. It was worth a shot.” Casey grabbed the rubber band off the bed where she had thrown it and wound it around the deck of cards before she tossed them back on the blanket. She faced Olivia, shoulders square, wearing her patented “Don’t give me any crap” look -- a remarkable feat at this hour. Yanking up one of her socks, she said, “So. The Brontës. Charlotte or Emily?”

 

“Neither.” Olivia put her head on her knees, her voice now muffled by the fabric of the pants she’d been wearing for almost twenty-four hours. “My Mom made me read _Jane Eyre_ when I was twelve. I kept waiting for something to happen.”

 

“Heathcliff dug up Cathy’s grave in _Wuthering Heights_. That was pretty dramatic.”

 

The stinging in her eyes was back, and Olivia wanted nothing more than for Casey to vanish with a puff of smoke, like the woman on _I Dream of Jeannie_.

 

Well. Almost nothing.

 

“You wish I’d disappear, don’t you?”

 

Olivia’s head snapped up. “What? No!”

 

“Shut up, Liv. I’ve already told you twice today what a crappy liar you are. I’m not offended. But I’m not leaving either. Not until it’s time for you to go back downstairs. So if you’re not into discussing the literary merits of the Brontë sisters, we’ll sit here and stare at each other. Or you can choose the next topic.”

 

“SweeTarts or Spree? That’s about the level of conversation I’m capable of-“ The ringing of her cell cut her off mid-sentence. “Sorry. Give me one second.” Casey nodded as Olivia reached for the phone automatically, answering without looking at the display.

 

“Benson.”

 

“It’s me. You busy?”

 

“No. Cragen sent me upstairs. What’s wrong?”

 

As Olivia spoke, Casey stood up and threw the cards into her bag, which she slung over her shoulder. She mouthed _I’ll call you in the morning_ before she walked out, ignoring the palm Olivia held up in an attempt to stop her.

 

“Elliot. Tell me what’s up.” Her voice echoed back and forth in the empty half-light of the crib.

 

“I think-“ He paused. On the other end of the line, Olivia listened to him breathe. The sound should have been comforting, and for a moment she couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t.

 

“You think what?” She pushed the blanket all the way to the side and sat up straight, the fingers on her free hand closing over the icy metal bed frame.

 

“Forget it. Nothing. Anything new there?”

 

 _Shit._ “Tell me what you were going to say.”

 

He still didn’t answer her, but he might as well have spoken, because in the silence she understood why she’d been unsettled since his first pause.

 

He was breathing twice as fast as he normally did.

 

“El. Why are you breathing like that? What’s going on?”

 

When his fingers had dialed her number again (seemingly on their own, against all the advice his brain was screaming at deafening decibels), he’d told himself that he’d only talk for a moment. Keep it light. Hear her voice to remind him that there was something beyond the cold, oppressive confines of this piece of crap Ford. He’d told himself he wouldn’t mention the nausea that had appeared again out of nowhere, or the fact that now he couldn’t even keep water down, no matter how hard he tried to use the mind over matter trick. He’d told himself he wouldn’t mention that every time he opened the door to throw up, the cold washed in until it made his teeth chatter. He was physically clamping his mouth shut at the moment, but he knew he’d have to open it to answer her.

 

When he did, all the promises he’d made to himself evaporated.

 

“I can’t stop throwing up. I don’t know if it’s the ankle or my head or just being so cold, but even the water won’t stay down now. I’m so fucking thirsty. I should stop drinking it to see if everything might settle down, but I can’t. And I’m pretty sure I have a fever. Probably the dehydration.” His teeth knocked together when he stopped talking and he jammed his jaw shut, forcing silence.

 

Olivia sat very still, as if controlling the motion of her body might magically enable her to control something else about this nightmare into which she seemed to keep falling, with no point of impact in sight. She wanted to smash her head against the wall, or scream, or run five miles as fast as she could, without stopping or slowing down for even a second. She couldn’t recall a time when she had felt less capable of maintaining control over herself. Yet she also couldn’t recall a time when it had been more important for her to at least appear calm, regardless of what insanity threatened to combust inside her. She took a deep breath, held it for five seconds, and exhaled silently, still holding the metal bed frame in a death grip with her free hand.

 

“Elliot. Listen to me. First you need to slow down your breathing. Hyperventilating like that is only gonna make you more dizzy and nauseous. Do it. Now.” She was surprised at how commanding she sounded, given that her number one impulse was to bury her face in the scratchy blanket and cry until someone came along to fix all this.

 

“Shit, Liv. I’m trying. It’s really cold in here.” Yet just the rhythm of her voice slowed him down -- the dancing of the consonants and vowels -- regardless of what words were coming out of her mouth. For the first time since he’d stepped in front of Mason Douglas’ car yesterday morning (it seemed more like four eternities ago), Elliot was glad that he couldn’t see her face. Until now, he’d wanted to look at her eyes so badly that he was convinced if he just opened his palm he could feel the desire sitting there, pressing his hand down with its weight. But now, even though his imagination constructed her face before him with such accuracy that the real thing couldn’t have been far off, he was glad he didn’t have to watch. His stomach twisted again and he swallowed, trying for control. He was down to the dry heaves, and those were only exhausting. Not helpful at all.

 

“Are you in the back seat?” Olivia chewed the inside of her lip, her concentration focused on nothing but keeping her voice steady.

 

“Yeah. Why?”

 

“Because you need to turn the heat on, even if it’s only for a few minutes. You said the guy left the keys, right? Pull yourself up and turn on the heat. Shivering’s only going to make your stomach and your fever worse. Put the phone down and I’ll wait while you do it.”

 

Elliot almost argued, almost said that he was too tired, but something in the quality of her voice -- the strain behind the strange evenness -- told him that now was a bad time to pick a fight. “Fine. Hold on.”

 

He slowly pushed himself forward over the seat, trying not to move his leg much while he extended his arm to reach the keys. When his fingertips finally made it, he clicked the key forward two notches until the stream of air swished to life, and he twisted the temperature knob fully into the red. Warm air poured out immediately, and he couldn’t deny that it felt good washing over his clammy skin. Slowly settling himself back in his chosen corner, he picked up the phone again.

 

“I turned the heat on. I don’t think I should leave it very long though. It’ll be dawn soon and the sun will warm it up in here.” He rubbed his hand over his forehead; his fingers came away with a thin film of sweat. He wanted to ask Olivia if they were any closer to figuring out where the hell he was, but he already knew the answer. If she had the tiniest bit of hope to offer him, she would have blurted it out the moment she heard his voice.

 

Olivia said nothing. What was there to say?

 

_Casey stopped by to play cards. She kicked my ass._

_We’re basically doing nothing to find you because we don’t have a single fucking lead._

_I want to know why you have a picture of us stuffed in the middle of a bunch of your newsmagazines. I want to know if you remember what happened afterwards, so you’d better haul your ass back here and tell me._

_I’m so terrified at the thought of you dying that if Cragen doesn’t let me out of here so that I can join everyone else in pretending to be useful, I’m probably going to be institutionalized within the hour._

 

“Hey, Liv?” His voice cut her off before she could add to her rapidly growing list of Things Not To Say.

 

“Yeah?” Luckily it was only one word, because her control was slipping. She was worn out with trying; right now it all seemed too hard.

 

“What’s your theory on what happens when you die?”

 

The room went blurry before her. In a choked whisper, she said, “Elliot, no. Don’t do this. Just _don’t_. I can’t-“ Her voice gave out, simply wouldn’t make noise, and she tried to breathe. It felt as if someone was holding her down, pressing against her chest until her lungs could only move two-dimensionally. She tried again, but the sensation that her whole chest was burning didn’t leave. For a second she thought that she shouldn’t clear her throat, because he’d hear her and know she was crying. But then she almost laughed, because he knew anyway. He always knew.

 

“Not the best time to ask, I know,” Elliot added uncertainly. “I need you to tell me anyway. Please.” His voice cracked on the _please_ , and he was surprised by how much he didn’t care.

 

“You know I’m not religious. Why are we having this conversation?” Her voice still sounded as if she were suffering from a pulmonary disorder, but at least sound was coming out.

 

“Olivia.” He didn’t waver at all this time. “One time, could we not do this crap? You know why we’re having this conversation. It’s a simple question. You can’t bullshit me into believing that you’ve never thought about it, whether you’re an atheist or an agnostic or. . . whatever. You’re a human being. It’s the kind of crap people think about, especially when they have jobs like ours. So tell me. Stop burning up the phone minutes, because I’m not hanging up until you tell me.”

 

“Well I don’t believe in hell.”

 

Elliot couldn’t help the smile that crept across his face at that one. He deserved it, he guessed. “Good to know.”

 

“And I don’t think. . . “ She trailed off, fumbling for words. Goddamn words. There were so _many_ of them in the English language. Hundreds of thousands. So why, when she needed to find only a few, a small combination of maybe twenty-five or fifty that would somehow transform the concept that hovered in the non-linguistic part of her brain, was she automatically paralyzed into silence?

 

Probably because all the words in the world didn’t cover the feeling that within forty-eight hours, it was becoming increasingly probable that Elliot would be dead, and he’d know the answer to his own question whether she did or not.

 

She plunged on anyway; language sucked at the moment, but it was what she had. “I don’t think that when you die, you’re just gone. All of you. I believe. . .“ Even though she still clutched the bedframe, her hand was trembling now. “I believe a part of you stays behind. But shit, Elliot. I have no idea what that means.”

 

“Maybe it means I can sneak into the shower when Detective Shelley is hosing down after her workout.”

 

Pushing aside the fact that Elliot was face-to-face confronting the theoretical possibility of his own death, Olivia retorted, “Shelley from the 2-7? The one with the weird teeth who Casey imitates when she’s not looking?”

 

Elliot would have laughed if he hadn’t been so tired. “Not sure, Liv. Haven’t spent a lot of time looking at her face.”

 

Olivia sighed. “Classy. Really.” Her cheeks were damp, and she rubbed her fingers over her skin, noticing how cold they were in comparison to her face.

 

“Wanna know what I think?” he asked, and Olivia tensed again; she’d thought maybe they were moving on. She should have known better. Elliot had never been able to leave something alone in his life.

 

“What’s that?”

 

“I think I have no fucking clue about what actually happens to your soul, or if God comes and takes you up to heaven, or in my case maybe down to hell. He’s probably waiting to strike me down right now for not giving you the Catholic line.” Elliot stopped, realizing suddenly that he felt less nauseous, that his stomach was no longer in open rebellion, at least for this tiny sliver of time. “I think it’s more about how people remember you.” He shifted his bad leg higher. “You probably think I’m nuts.”

 

“I don’t.” She meant to add something, but the inadequacy of language dropped her on her ass again, so she waited for him to continue.

 

“If the people who matter remember more positive than negative stuff, I think I’m good.” He ran his thumb over the textured upholstery, amused at the oddity of being able to feel but not see the coarse fabric. “Although I guess with respect to you, I probably should have bought it two years ago, huh?”

 

Olivia swallowed the twenty or so possible replies that bubbled up before her like multiple choice answers. Almost inaudibly, she said, “You don’t know half as much as you think you do.”

 

“Tell me about it. Over the last couple months I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t know shit.”

 

Olivia risked releasing the bed frame and rubbed her freezing palm against the polyester sheet. “We need to hang up, El.”

 

“Yeah.” In the space after his single syllable, Elliot could hear the symphony of things they weren’t saying, each instrument its own aborted conversation, stupid misunderstanding, misleading half-truth, or outright evasion. Without thinking, he blurted, “I have this picture of us. In my apartment.”

 

Olivia held her breath until her heart stopped beating funny and she decided it was safe to speak. “The one stuck in the middle of the _Newsweeks_ you pretend to read? I know. I found it. Why’s it there?”

 

Elliot coughed, grateful that with the warm air circulating through the car, coughing no longer made him want to throw up. “That’s the thing,” he answered, his voice gravelly with exhaustion and some other quality Olivia genuinely didn’t want to consider. “I ran across it when I was going through some boxes from home. Threw all the rest of the shit in the trash without even thinking about it. But. . . I couldn’t throw away the picture. So I stuck it in the magazines and figured I’d deal with it later.”

 

He paused, noticing that the sky was beginning to lighten almost imperceptibly. If it hadn’t been so black in the first place, the change wouldn’t have registered at all. “What happened there, Liv? After the picture? What the hell was that?” God, he wanted more water. “And don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. It wasn’t just me.”

 

“No,” she replied, disgusted at how quivery her voice was now. “It wasn’t.”

 

“So?” His already unsteady stomach tightened in anticipation of her answer, although he was halfway convinced that whatever she was about to say was the last thing he wanted to hear. He didn’t have a clue where he was going with any of this, or what had made him bring up the picture at all.

 

“El.” Her throat hurt so much that speaking felt like rubbing sandpaper against her vocal cords, but she jammed the words forward. “We can do this when you get back.”

 

“We both know I might not get back, Liv.”

 

There. He’d said it. The words they’d been frantically dodging since the second she answered the phone.

 

“No.” She stood up much too quickly, goosebumps rising all over her body. “You want to make up for whatever I’ve thought of you for the past two years? Don’t say that. Ever again.” She wanted to say more, but the room was spinning now, so she took a few steps toward the wall and pressed her back against its concrete reassurance.

 

“I’m sorry. I only meant that maybe we should-“

 

“No. We shouldn’t.” She snapped her head back hard, appreciating the crack of pain that spread over her scalp when her bones impacted the wall. “We should figure out how to get you out of there. That’s it. My jail time is over, so I’m hanging up and going downstairs. Get some rest and I’ll call you in a few hours.”

 

She forced her thumb to push the end call button, ignoring the tears that now dripped off her chin onto her wrinkled shirt. For half a minute she stood there, listening to the bits of ambient noise that filtered into the room. The faint beep of a horn. Someone on the night shift yelling one floor up. The pop of the ancient radiator as it contracted. Finally, she ran her hands through her hair and headed out of the crib, almost colliding with Cragen as she reached the door. He caught her by the shoulders to arrest her forward motion, shaking his head as he released her. “Good to see you following orders as always.”

 

“I did what you told me to do.”

 

“Right. Well under normal circumstances I’d pause for a lecture, but the local PD in Fairmont, West Virginia just picked up Mason Douglas. A couple marshals are bringing him here by chopper right now. He doesn’t have his daughter with him.”

 

“So we’ll find her. Where’s Elliot?”

 

Cragen put his hand against the doorframe, leaning slightly sideways as the light from the hall shaped him into a strange silhouette. He studied the floor for a beat before speaking. “Douglas isn’t talking. To anyone. He lawyered up before they could finish Mirandizing him, and hasn’t said a word since.”

 

Olivia looked at Cragen for several seconds, silently absorbing his words, sorting them out to process their significance. Finally she said, “Give me five minutes with him. He’ll talk.”


	6. Chapter 6

I left my dreams with broken strings

It's time I learnt to talk

Stop falling over things

Teach myself to walk

I'm not a superman

Or Mr. Wonderful, because

I'm the fool I never

Fool I never thought I was

~~~~Mark Knopfler: I’m the Fool

 

________________

 

 

As the sky lightened at a pace perceptible only because he had nothing to do but observe it, Elliot shivered, his right arm chafing against the Scotch Guard. Half an hour ago (give or take), he’d finally stopped taking sips of water, because they inevitably came back up within five minutes, and he was becoming too exhausted to vomit. The desire to drink was so overwhelming that he found it hard to concentrate on anything else, but years of disciplining himself not to think about certain subjects now came in surprisingly handy, and he forced his brain to divert from the well driven Thirst Obsession Interstate and take some scenic back roads that provided more in the way of distraction.

 

What he realized first was how long it had been since he’d spent any time being still, quiet, alone with nothing but his thoughts. In fact, he hadn’t had this much time to think since those long nights camping with his uncle, when Elliot had stayed awake long after his cousins dropped off, listening to the water rhythmically slapping the sand at the lake’s edge and watching the distinctive patterns the stars formed in the sky.

 

He couldn’t help but smile now, when he recalled the things he’d considered important at the time. Most of his thoughts had been consumed by the present – wondering if he’d be able to stay up on water-skis longer than his cousin the next morning, what they’d have for breakfast, or who would catch the most fish. If a dark idea flashed across his consciousness, it was only the ever-present knowledge that this time was finite; within days, he’d be home with his father again. Even that only got him down for a minute, and he’d go back to plotting how to get the last Twinkie before one of his cousins beat him to it.

 

Now, the thought of Twinkies made him want to throw up again, so he thought about death instead.

 

Death.

 

When the word appeared in his mind now, it had a capital D, and he vaguely wondered why. When he thought about most words -- about how they looked when typed in uniform black print on a white sheet of paper -- they looked normal. Lower case. Unless of course he happened to be thinking about words like Poughkeepsie or NYPD. Kathy. Olivia.

 

Death with a capital D. The word. The concept. The flipside and inescapable consequence of life.

 

Most people who didn’t know Elliot probably assumed that given his occupation, he pondered the possibility of his own death on a regular basis. Yet although he was clearly aware that each time he knocked on a suspect’s door, each time he chased some unknown guy down an alley, he could wind up with a bullet in his head, he’d spent his entire life too busy to give it a lot of consideration.

 

Sure, a few specific events had helpfully sharpened his perception of the concept. When Victor Gitano had stood beside him, holding a shotgun to his head, Elliot had been perfectly aware that he could be seconds away from having his brain splattered all over that warehouse floor. While it wouldn’t have been his first choice, and he was glad when he wound up wearing Gitano’s brains instead of the other way around, as he felt the icy metal and listened to the psychotic ranting of the man next to him, he hadn’t thought primarily of himself.

 

He had thought of Olivia. Of Kathy. Of his kids. He’d even started to think about all the shit he wished he’d done differently in his life, but then the ATF sniper had spared him from such unsettling introspection. After a ten second window in which he took a few deep breaths and stared at Olivia until he couldn’t stand the look in her eyes anymore, they’d heard Rebecca’s voice and that had been the end of it.

 

Back to the life that stopped for nothing.

 

He liked it best that way. This sitting in a car and thinking nonstop was for shit.

 

The air around him was a warm rose color by now, but he closed his eyes and leaned his head back again; having his eyes shut lessened the nausea a tiny bit.

 

Basically, he was fucked.

 

Elliot had always figured that if he had a chance to think before he died, his foremost emotion would be regret. Either that or guilt. And he was partially right, because as the fever and the dehydration made it harder and harder for him to tease apart reality from the world unfolding inside his mind, he regretted a lot of things.

 

Back to envisioning the blank white sheet of paper, he made an abbreviated list (the full list was too tiring to think about):

 

Running away from home for three hours when he was seven, because his Dad had made him spend an entire Sunday cleaning the basement instead of playing baseball with his friends. His Mom hadn’t said a word when he finally came home long after dark, but he never forgot the expression on her face as she stopped in the door of his room after tucking him in bed. Years later, Maureen had pulled basically the same thing. When she was back in the house and the crisis was over, he’d locked himself in the bathroom, put his forehead on the tile floor, and cried.

 

Only getting to first base with Amy Cotugno in tenth grade. She had the most amazing rack in the world, and after their one and only date had ended with a horribly awkward makeout session in the back of a friend’s car, Elliot had gone inside and slammed his head into the pillow, convinced that if he had just had the balls to uh, seize the opportunity, she would have let him feel her up.

 

Changing the subject the very first time Kathy asked him to tell her what he’d done at work that day. Maybe if he’d answered her question, as if discussing the repeated rape of an eight-year-old girl were normal evening conversation, it would have become natural. The moment he said, “Can I help with dinner?” instead, the opportunity had already drifted past, a piece of litter the wind surprises away from you, and you always feel a little guilty that you never caught it and put it in the trash.

 

Drinking five vodka sours and three beers the night of Dan Houseman’s retirement party. Elliot couldn’t remember a lot after the first four drinks, but apparently he had removed some clothing that should have stayed on and tried to take over for the band’s drummer.

 

Letting Kathy leave when she said she wanted to.

 

Walking away from Olivia outside Rebecca Clifford’s hospital room.

 

The fact that after almost nine years of partnership, he couldn’t remember ever hugging Olivia. Ever really touching her except in the most impersonal of ways. How was that possible?

Elliot opened his eyes again, although he hadn’t been aware that they were closed. His skin felt hot all over, but it was clammy to the touch and he was shaking. The sun was higher in the sky now, but when he tried to look through the car window -- at the trees that blended together only a few yards away -- objects began to shimmer and merge, wiggling in patterns that didn’t represent anything found in the natural world. He meant to blink his eyes in an attempt to focus, but when they closed, they wouldn’t open again this time.

 

His head slipped back and he drifted. His last half-formed thought was that he should drink something.

 

________________

 

When he opens his eyes, it’s twilight again. He thinks he’s still in the car until he realizes that he’s not thirsty or hungry. That nothing hurts. That he’s not even sitting up, but lying down.

 

That he’s naked. In bed.

 

And Olivia’s with him.

 

She’s turned away, on her side, barely covered to the waist, and he quietly watches the rise and fall of her ribcage, the curves and arches of her shoulder blades and her hips, as he listens to the almost imperceptible sound of her inhaling and exhaling, again and again and again.

 

She’s asleep. He has no idea why he knows this, since he can’t see her face at all.

 

But he knows.

 

He leans forward to where her hair has landed on the pillow and breathes in, following her rhythm. Her hair smells like coffee; it makes him smile, because he wonders if she was so tired after work that she went straight to bed, with the coffee-laden air of the bullpen soaked right into her hair and skin.

 

Barely moving on the bed -- just a few inches to make sure he’s close enough -- he extends his arm toward her, his fingers landing on the curve where her neck meets her shoulder. Infinitesimally, as if time doesn’t exist, or if it does it’s irrelevant, he moves his fingers over her skin. First, the arc of her shoulder, then gently down her arm, palm flat against the warmth, until he reaches her hand and places each of his fingers flush over hers. He holds them there, sensing the blood in his hands, the beats like a clock.

 

He returns to her shoulder blades and starts slowly down her back, making diagonal patterns until he hits her waist. As his hand traces the rise of her hip, he slides it over until his fingers meet the even softer skin of her stomach.

 

He stops there. Holding his breath. Waiting.

 

He wants to see her eyes. This realization rises up in him with such instant clarity that he wonders if he might be able to touch that too, if he bothered to try. Yet in the same instant, he’s mystically aware that the moment he wakes her, it’s done. The touching only happens in dreams.

 

Still, this once, he wants to make the decision, to know with conviction that at least one time in his fucking life, he’s making a choice that won’t add another number to his list of regrets. The choice that he’d make again, even when he knows before he moves a millimeter that in the end, it’s going to hurt like a son of a bitch.

 

Time’s up.

 

He moves forward suddenly, wrapping his arm around her waist and gathering her entire body to his, until he’s pressed against her from where his lips touch the strands of her hair to where he can feel her ankles twisted with his.

 

It actually surprises him when he hears her voice. Not what he expected to happen.

 

“What’s wrong?” she says quietly.

 

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

 

Panic engulfs him. His heart accelerates so rapidly that he’s dizzy. He knows what comes next and despite the fact that ten seconds ago he was convinced it was the only thing he wanted, he’s desperate to stop time, to flip it backward and make it all rewind, just this once.

 

“No. You wanted something. Tell me.” As she speaks, she rolls over, still within the circle of his arm, and her eyes meet his.

 

When they do, he understands with unfathomable certainty that this time he got it right. Made the right choice. He rests his hand on her face, his thumb smoothing over her cheekbone. Clearing his throat, he says, all in a rush because she’s already fading, “Promise me one thing.”

 

“Okay.” Her eyes don’t waver. Nine years of them, clear and undiluted, but when added up full of so much power that he doesn’t know what to do with any of it.

 

“Don’t look away.” The words barely make it out; this hurts so much he can’t breathe.

 

“I won’t.”

 

So he memorizes, his hand on her face, somehow managing simultaneously to look both directly at her, yet also beyond her, into the past they’ve irrevocably fucked up. As he does, he hates himself for every time he could have changed it and didn’t.

 

The image bleaches; for a moment before she’s gone he can see through her.

 

Then he’s alone, his hand holding only the sheet, his body covered in sweat.

 

But he’s not sorry.

 

_________________

 

In the ladies’ locker room, Olivia stood in the shower, her forehead against the damp tile. She’d turned the heat up as far as she could stand it; steam drifted and swayed around her, but she felt rather than saw it, because her eyes were closed. The water streamed over the base of her neck and down her back, and probably because she had passed exhaustion about six hours ago and was now in some sort of trancelike state that existed beyond exhaustion’s hazily defined borders, she thought about water. About the full glass of water she’d swallowed in large gulps before she walked into the locker room. About the water pelting from the faucet above her, stinging her skin before whirlpooling down the drain. About the fact that while Elliot was apparently only yards away from water, and had drinking water in the car with him, none of that mattered, because his body wasn’t cooperating and all the water in the world couldn’t keep him from dehydrating.

 

She thought about the fact that twenty-four hours ago, dehydration had been nothing more than a word to her. Sure, she understood the concept, but dehydration was such a treatable problem. Toss someone in the ER. Hook up an IV. Done. It didn’t kill people. Not in the U.S.

 

_Stop it. Focus. Think about the interrogation. Figure out how to get this asshole to tell you where Elliot is._

 

She leaned her head back under the spray, trying to rinse the last soapsuds from her hair. She’d finally listened to Cragen’s barked orders to eat the bowl of Special K with a half-pint carton of whole milk (She’d almost smiled, because Cragen knew she hated whole milk. He had to have chosen it for maximum caloric value.), and drink the glass of orange juice he’d slammed on her desk half an hour ago. The influx of calories had temporarily stopped the shaking that had started the instant Cragen told her Douglas was on his way, but at this point, nothing could make up for the fact that she’d been awake for over twenty-four hours. Her eyes were gritty, her head hurt, and she kept losing her train of thought mid-sentence. She was in no condition to do an interrogation, and she knew it. Somehow she was going to have to fake it, however, because there was no fucking way she’d let anybody else take the first crack at the man responsible for her waking nightmare.

 

She turned off the shower, massaging the back of her neck for a second before she climbed out. She could almost feel Elliot’s hand there, hear his voice mere inches away from her. _You’re not whining,_ he’d said. But although she’d appreciated his concern at the time, she’d been so wrapped up in her own shit that she hadn’t really been listening. They hadn’t listened to each other for so long that she wondered if they’d forgotten how.

 

Olivia yanked a clean shirt from her locker and pulled it over her head, mumbling a curse when it stuck on the skin she hadn’t bothered to dry completely. As she pulled her damp hair free of her clothing, her eyes landed on something in the back of her locker. She reached her hand in to pull it out.

 

A pair of Elliot’s workout shorts. She had no idea how they’d wound up in her locker. When she’d gotten back from Oregon and the two of them had been getting along for five minutes, they’d briefly returned to their practice of doubling up on laundry every now and then; maybe that was the explanation. Now she simply stood there, half dressed, holding his shorts in her hand, looking at the neat navy and white stripes that decorated the soft cotton.

 

Funny, all the shit that becomes instantly irrelevant the moment you realize someone you love might die. And what pissed her off the most was that this wasn’t the first time. After Gitano, after she’d spent those never-ending seconds genuinely wondering if the man was about to spray Elliot’s brains across the room, right in front of her, she had sworn to herself that things would be different. Sworn to herself that she’d stop pretending everything was fine. Exactly like it used to be. Effortless and simple and comforting, instead of terrifying and painful.

 

The request for a new partner had, in her own mind, been a twisted way of trying to move things forward, but that wasn’t quite how it had worked out. The old patterns were alluringly familiar, and after over two years of stab and retreat, she’d begun to wonder if the two of them were even capable of anything else.

 

 _Fuck_.

 

She threw his damn shorts decisively back into her locker and slammed it shut, the metallic snap satisfyingly loud. Shoving her legs into her jeans, she walked out, wishing the locker room could contain her terror as easily as it did the shower steam.

 

________________

 

“Olivia. I need to talk to you for a minute.” Cragen walked toward her, holding a mug of coffee and looking even greyer than he had an hour ago.

 

“Why? Is Douglas here?”

 

“Yes,” he answered tiredly, “But-“

 

“No. No ‘but.’ I’m talking to him. Now.”

 

“Since when are you the boss here?” Cragen retorted sharply, glaring at her as he swallowed a sip of coffee, then wincing when it burned his mouth. “You’ll listen to me for a minute or you won’t go in there.”

 

“Fine. One minute. What?”

 

“You’re in no shape to interrogate anyone. None of us are.” Cragen looked past her down the hall, as if maybe the answer they were all searching for might be printed in very small letters on the gun control poster taped to the far wall. He coughed. “I’m letting you go in there for one reason.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“I’m too tired to deal with the tantrum you’ll throw if I don’t,” he responded dryly. “But I’m putting you on notice. I’ll be watching the whole thing. If you so much as move your fingernail in a manner that makes me think you’re about to go postal on this guy, I’ll have you out of there in less than ten seconds, no matter what it takes to make that happen. You owe it to Elliot to control yourself. We all do. The only thing that matters is getting the information. You won’t intimidate a guy this smart by roughing him up. Are we clear?”

 

Olivia stared at the floor, at the way the tile seams blurred in her vision. “Yeah. Clear.”

 

Cragen nodded. “He’s in Interrogation Two. Go.”

 

________________

 

Olivia placed her fingers on the handle of the door and paused, taking a long, deep breath before she finally turned it and entered the room. Her hair was still slightly damp; she felt cold, ill, and so tired that the act of moving her body forward accelerated her heart rate.

 

At the other end of the rectangular table sat Mason Douglas, holding a white Styrofoam cup of coffee. His blue button-down shirt was wrinkled and dirty. He looked as exhausted as she felt, and although he glanced up when she entered the room, he only observed her for a moment before his eyes dropped back to the anemic-looking contents of his coffee cup. The little red stirrer with the white stripe went round and round, propelled by the barely noticeable movement of his fingers.

 

Olivia thought that if she turned her head sideways, the stripe would be horizontal instead of vertical. But as she stood for a few seconds, absorbing the appearance of the man who had, with one split-second decision, fully rearranged her life (probably forever, no matter how all this turned out), the crimson energy of rage returned, and she found her focus magically restored.

 

The interrogation playbook was very specific that the first order of business was to make the suspect comfortable. Talk about the Yankees, tax rates (even that had risky political connotations), or the weather. A comfortable suspect, the playbook insisted, was more likely to talk.

 

So Olivia walked slowly toward the table, slapped both her palms down on its cool surface, about six inches away from Mason Douglas’ coffee cup, and said, “Where the hell is my partner?”

 

“Well.” Douglas leaned back in his chair, still stirring his coffee, which must have been cold by now, with all that exposure to air. “At least you’re direct. That’s refreshing. You and your partner have that in common, I guess.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Being direct. I don’t think he followed the rules in whatever kidnapping handbook you guys probably keep at home. Filed under K.” He paused, as if considering whether or not he should continue. “I assumed they’d send in the shrink before you arrived.”

 

“Will you tell _him_ where my partner is?” Olivia couldn’t decide whether it made her angrier to look at him or look away.

 

“No.”

 

“Didn’t think so. That’s why we skipped straight to me.”

 

“Look. I told the cops in West Virginia. I’m not talking. To you. To your shrink. To your Captain, who I’m sure is listening in to make sure you don’t beat the shit out of me, or if you do you don’t leave bruises in inconvenient locations. I’m not talking.”

 

“Okay.” Olivia stood silently, gambling that her assent would bother him more than any argument she could have concocted in the milliseconds since he’d stopped talking.

 

“Excuse me?” He stopped stirring, and Olivia saw something flicker in his eyes. It made her want to throw his chair backward, dig her fingers into his throat, and jam her knee into his balls until he fucking told her what he’d done with Elliot. Because even though the expression was deceptively evanescent, she suddenly knew (in a way that she never could have rationalized to Cragen, or even George) that this man wanted to tell her.

 

But he wasn’t going to.

 

“I said, ‘Okay.’” She wished she had the luxury of running down the hall to vomit.

 

“That’s it then? You’re gonna sit here and watch me drink crappy coffee until my lawyer shows up?”

 

“Oh I didn’t say that.” Olivia took two steps forward, pulled out the chair directly across from him, and sat down.

 

He was already so white that it was hard to tell, but he might have gone slightly paler. “Well what then? You can definitely skip the shit where you try to be friends with me. I know what you want and I can’t give it to you.”

 

Filing away his use of the word “can’t” for future reference, Olivia leaned closer. With her voice so low she wondered if even Cragen would be able to make out her words, she murmured, “My partner is in the middle of nowhere. He’s dehydrated and he’s dying. You think I want to be your friend?”

 

“Probably not.” Douglas tipped the Styrofoam cup back for the final swallow before crumpling it. He sent it sailing across the room into the trash.

 

Olivia tried not to think about how many times she’d seen Elliot make exactly that motion. Of the way his face would break into an irresistible smile on the rare occasions when he sunk the shot. Of how long it had been since he’d done anything that pointless and juvenile. Of how badly she wished she could get him back, just so she’d have the opportunity to watch him be a pointless juvenile asshole.

 

One more time.

 

 _One more time_.

 

“You don’t have to say another word,” Olivia said firmly, the instant she trusted her voice enough to speak. “I’m gonna talk for a minute, and you’re gonna listen. Then I’ll leave and give you the chance to think about what I’ve said. Okay?”

 

“That was a rhetorical question, right?” Douglas shook his head. “I hate it when people ask me questions that only have one answer.”

 

“Well shut up then.” Olivia’s hands were pressed so firmly into the table that she could feel her pulse in her palms. It was out of synch with the wall clock, and this annoyed her inordinately as she tried to figure out exactly what it was that she wanted to say.

 

“Mr. Douglas, you-“

 

“Will you call me Mason? Your partner and I had this conversation, too.”

 

“I’ll call you whatever the hell you want me to. For someone who doesn’t want to talk you do a lot of interrupting.”

 

He didn’t have a smartass reply to that, so she continued. “You have a daughter.” Olivia could see the way the man’s body tensed, almost against his will. “I don’t know what you did with her, and I know you’re not going to tell me.”

 

She forced her feet into her shoes until her toes throbbed. Anything to distract herself from her rising desire to beat the shit out of whatever was moving in the room until she knew where Elliot was. When the momentary wave subsided, she went on. “Detective Stabler has three daughters. And a son. I spoke with him on the phone a little over an hour ago, and he was so sick that he couldn’t even keep down the water you so thoughtfully left for him. He’s dying, Mason. Quickly.”

 

She paused for a breath. “So if you don’t tell someone where he is – and I don’t give a shit if it’s me or the shrink or my boss or the janitor down the hall – in somewhere around twenty-four hours, give or take, five kids are going to lose a parent.”

 

She had to hand it to him that he didn’t say something stupid like, _But you said Detective Stabler only has four children._ She’d gambled that he’d be smart enough to connect the dots.

 

Olivia stood up so quickly that the color in the room faded briefly before returning, as if an invisible hand was adjusting the contrast level in the atmosphere. She walked to the door and placed her palm on the handle before turning back to face Mason, her arm still twisted behind her, holding the door. “I’m gonna get another cup of coffee. I’ll bring you one, too. While I do that, think about what I said.”

 

Before any of the hundred other things she wanted to scream in his direction escaped her mouth, she jerked the door open and left the room. She kept going, right past Cragen and George, until she reached the bathroom. Leaning over the sink, she cranked the cold water on full blast and began to scrub it against her face, over and over again, until her skin felt blue and chafed and numb.

 

She carefully avoided looking at herself in the mirror and finally slipped into a stall, where she sat down on the toilet, even though she was fully clothed. Resting her freezing face in her hands, she thought about the words that had waltzed through her mind as she’d watched Mason’s coffee cup take its slow arc through the air.

 

 _One more time_.


	7. Chapter 7

Now there's a moment between forward and retreating

When you're just not sure which path you ought to choose

Then the sun shines brightly on the golden meadow

And suddenly, you're not at all confused

Suddenly, you're not confused

~~~~Peter, Paul & Mary: Take the Chance

 

________________

 

Water. Dripping, trickling, splashing. Everywhere and nowhere, because he couldn’t see it, but it bombarded the one remaining sense that still seemed to be functioning. Elliot had given up trying to force his eyes open when he realized that he could no longer tell whether they were open or closed. For increasingly brief periods of time, he’d remember where he was, getting warmer and warmer in the confines of the car as the sun rose outside. He wanted to roll the window down further (it was only cracked slightly), but the thought of doing that seemed to exist in this abstract space that had no connection to what his body was doing.

 

The amusing thing was that although he could hear the water floating and washing by outside the car (and it sometimes felt as if it might be inside, too, just because of the volume), the thirst that had haunted him for hours was now entirely gone. He felt fine. Floaty.

 

Content.

 

His head no longer throbbed. His ankle no longer pulsed or caused his stomach to contract every time he shifted. His stomach neither grumbled with hunger nor seized him with violent nausea. Everything was strangely calm. His skin felt electrified, as if each of his nerve endings had a positive charge, and he had the momentary image of himself surrounded by an eerie ionic aura.

 

He’d always assumed that dying would hurt.

 

But it didn’t, so he listened to the water splashing, while unexpected, unconnected memory fragments seeped into his consciousness, slowly filling the places where (a few hours ago) he’d been thinking about all the things he was leaving undone. All the things he’d figured he’d have time to sort out at some point. Later.

 

The ocean, the first time they’d taken Maureen when she was a baby. The crashing of the waves pounding the sand creating a sharp contrast with the slosh of the water in Maureen’s purple bucket, next to which she sat for hours, making shapes with her shovel and squishing her tiny perfect hands into the rough brown and tan grains.

 

Kathleen’s sippy cup, shaking back and forth in the back of the car as they drove toward his parents’ house. Kathy’s voice. _Kathleen, cut it out. You’re going to have water everywhere_. And nothing but the answering joy of Kathleen’s tiny giggle as she continued to slosh the water back and forth. Back and forth.

 

Water gushing from the sink tap, inches from his face. The taste of vomit fresh in his mouth as he tried to rinse it out with the cool liquid. Olivia standing a few feet away, arms crossed, not moving forward to help him, but not moving backward either. Just static. There. Her voice. _You can’t do this for a month, Elliot. Go home. We’ll get this asshole without you here puking every half hour._

 

His shower at home. What had once been home, long after midnight. Soapsuds and blood mixing and swirling as he washed the cuts on his hands and arms, the result of a particularly determined suspect taking off on foot. Idly wondering whether Olivia was naked in her shower, too, watching her own blood blend with the fragrant body wash that smelled nothing like Kathy’s six pack soap from Target. The pink water moving in a tightening circle, until it was finally clear, pristine again, but still curving in the same pattern, inexorably reaching for the round metal of the drain.

 

________________

 

Olivia sat on the toilet seat for a solid ten minutes before she realized that it was cutting into her ass, and if she didn’t watch it, her exhausted muscles would release on their own and drop her butt into the toilet bowl. Finally she stood up, once again turned on the tap water as cold as it would go, and gave her face a final scrub before she stood and wiped off the water with a scratchy brown paper towel. Although she looked in the mirror for only a moment, she would have grinned had she had the energy at the way the fluorescent lights combined with her indescribable exhaustion to make her look, quite literally, green.

 

Back in the bullpen, she ignored Fin, Munch, and Lake as she poured two Styrofoam cups of coffee from the mercifully full carafe. She found herself hoping that Munch had made it (the scent wafting from her cup indicated this was likely), so that Douglas would be punished from all possible angles. She added milk and sugar to her own and nothing to Douglas’, and was turning to head back into interrogation when Fin’s voice stopped her.

 

“Liv. Hang on.”

 

“What?” She was too tired to bother with even the most minimal civilities. Fin appeared not to notice.

 

“We’ve been trying to locate Douglas’ wife. Kinda odd she hasn’t shown up when her ten year old daughter’s been missin’ for over twenty-four hours.”

 

Olivia forced her eyes to focus on Fin’s. “And you found her?”

 

Fin shifted the file he was holding to his other hand. “No. But not an hour after Douglas forced Elliot to get in his car, his wife caught a plane to Buenos Aires. Visual ID from the crew says it was definitely her. Of course, nobody knows where she went when she landed.” Fin reached for the coffee himself, sitting the file precariously on top of the coffeemaker. “No clue what she’s doing. The local police are lookin’ for her. I thought you’d want to know before you head back in there with Douglas.”

 

Olivia tried to lift her mouth into a half-smile. “I’ll use anything I can get. Thanks.”

 

Fin nodded and walked back to his desk, dropping the file with a slap that made Olivia flinch.

 

________________

 

When she pushed open the door to Interrogation Two, somehow holding both coffees in her left hand by grasping the bottom of the cups, Douglas was improbably reclining in his chair, his head sideways at an uncomfortable angle and his eyes half shut, though he clearly wasn’t sleeping. He sat up when he heard the door and studied Olivia as she put the coffee in front of him.

 

“Did you check to make sure you gave me the one with arsenic?” he asked wryly, twisting his neck to the side until it gave a loud snap.

 

“Yeah,” Olivia replied, deadpan. “Drink up.”

 

He took a long swallow and grimaced. “Might not be arsenic, but I’d be willing to swear it’s equally deadly. Who the hell made this?”

 

Olivia sat on the edge of the table, too jittery to opt for the chair this time. “You know, I’d love to sit here and swap unfunny jokes about coffee, but my partner’s imminent death has me a little distracted. Maybe next time.” So that she’d appear occupied, she took a sip of her own coffee and silently concurred with Douglas’ assessment of its quality.

 

The only sounds in the room were the sinister ticking of the wall clock and the erratic pattern of Mason Douglas’ finger hitting the edge of the table. After a moment, Olivia reached forward and slapped her hand over his, hard. Her face inches from his, she said evenly, “I’d already like to kill you. Don’t make it worse.” She pulled her hand back and his stilled immediately.

 

When she saw that she had his full attention, she backed off, allowing him a second to reconstruct his wall of personal space. Then she said, even more quietly, “Did you think about what I said?”

 

“Yes.” He didn’t hesitate. Then he added, “But I’m still not going to tell you where he is.”

 

It was odd, Olivia thought, the way people described rage as _seeing_ red. She saw nothing. In fact, the room went almost grayscale before her eyes as the import of his comment filtered through her battered mind. But if she didn’t _see_ red, she certainly felt it, flooding through her like liquid fire, coursing inside until she was sure she could have lit candles with her fingertips.

 

She struggled to master it, but she was tired. _So tired_.

 

Still, her voice surprised her with its atonal flatness when she said, “So you’re going to let him die.”

 

He slammed his palms on the table in front of him, and his elbow knocked his coffee cup over. The sickly brown liquid spread quickly over the table’s surface, dripping over the edges and splashing onto the floor. Olivia stared at it, making no move to intervene, and Douglas ignored it too, directing his attention only at her.

 

“You don’t understand what’s happening in this-“ He cut himself off abruptly, starting again. “I don’t want him to die.”

 

“Bull _shit_ you don’t. You’re _killing_ him. Right now. Tell me where he is and we can probably be there within the hour.”

 

Mason watched the coffee trickle off the table, more and more slowly with each round brown drop. “It’s not that easy. He’s not the only one-“ He stopped again.

 

Olivia struggled to breathe, to process, to not reach forward and put her hands around his throat. It would feel so good to have his life in her hands the way he had Elliot’s in his. Just for a second, to feel his pulse against her palms, know that she could snuff it out if she wanted to. _God. You are losing it. You can’t do this. Elliot’s not gone yet._ She dug her fingernails into the flesh of her hands, waiting to see if Douglas would resume speaking.

 

After a few more smacks of the clock’s second hand, he did. “Okay. Here’s the deal. I’ll tell you where he is at nine.” He glanced at his watch. “That’s about two hours. The chances that those two hours will make any difference to him are pretty small, I hope.” He righted his coffee cup and peered into it, as if a few drops might have chosen to remain behind. “But I can’t tell you before then. So you might as well stop wasting your time in here.”

 

He looked at her now, his stare convicted and unflinching, and despite the fact that the two men could not have been more different, she was unaccountably reminded of the feeling she had when her eyes met Elliot’s and she knew in a millisecond that she had lost. That nothing she could say or do would change his mind.

 

Mason wore that exact look now, and Olivia swallowed hard against the impotent fury that, combined with the grinding toll of stress and lack of sleep, was threatening to wipe out every trace of impulse control she had left. She took a step forward, unsure of what she was about to do, and felt Cragen’s hand on her arm. He wasn’t hurting her, but she knew instinctively that if she moved an inch further, his fingers would tighten.

 

As if he were requesting that she turn in an irrelevant piece of paperwork, Cragen said evenly, “Detective Benson, could I speak with you outside for a moment?” He turned toward Douglas. “Mr. Douglas, I’ll have someone bring you a fresh cup of coffee and some paper towels. But make yourself as comfortable as you can get within these walls, because you’re not going anywhere.”

 

Douglas slumped back in his chair, running a hand over his face. “I figured as much,” he mumbled.

 

Cragen nodded slightly and almost shoved Olivia out the door ahead of him.

 

________________

 

Half an hour later, Olivia gasped for air, but it didn’t stop her from running faster, even though each breath hurt. Her feet smacked the treadmill with a hypnotic rhythm, and she paid no attention to the sweat that coated her face and dripped down her back. Her conversation with Cragen played in her head as if he were a track on her iPod, stuck on repeat.

 

_“You’re not going back in there with him. We’ll keep working, but in two hours he’ll tell us where Elliot is. I’ll call the state police right now. They’ll have a chopper waiting to lift off the moment you’ve got the information.” Cragen squinted as if he were staring at something unnaturally bright, even though the light in the hallway was muted at best._

_“What if he’s lying? What if we sit here, screwing around doing god knows what for the next two hours, and he says Elliot’s in fucking Disneyland?” Her voice shook with the effort it took to maintain control._

_“What’s your counterproposal? Kill him?” Cragen shifted his weight to his other foot. “Huang thinks he’s telling the truth. But even if he isn’t, going in there and intimidating him more isn’t going to get you anything else. He’s as strung out as we all are, and all of us, especially you, need to stay the hell away from him.”_

_“Fine. I’m going to the gym.” She pivoted and wished she had the energy to stomp away._

_“Yeah. You do that,” muttered Cragen, turning back towards the bullpen._

 

Olivia kept running, shooting what must have been her thousandth glare at the clock. Time was standing still. The half an hour that had elapsed since Cragen pulled her out of interrogation had gone by in slow motion. Even voices seemed warped and otherwordly, as if they were being filtered through one of those machines designed to mask your identity. She’d hear people walk by in the hallway outside, beginning their workday as if nothing were out of the ordinary, but she couldn’t understand them. She was underwater, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t quite rise far enough to break the surface. Her body was so tired that she now trembled constantly, but it didn’t stop her from running.

 

 _Running. Running. Because stopping would mean . . . she didn’t know_.

 

She tried not to let images of Elliot infiltrate her defenses, because when she did, she finally understood why some people needed sedatives to deal with this level of stress.

 

She tried to think about ice cream. About waterskiing. About those skeeball games she used to play on the boardwalk when some creepy date took her to the beach. About. . .

 

But it didn’t help, because the memories that would have distracted her under any other circumstances -- the happy memories, the little moments she could resurrect and reconstruct to attempt to keep herself sane -- almost all of them involved Elliot. This had never occurred to her before, and she found herself wishing that this particular epiphany could have waited for a different moment to descend on her with hurricane force.

 

It was only when her muscles flatly refused to do as she asked that she was forced to slow down. She clicked the speed down a few notches as she heard footsteps and turned to see Fin, his expression resembling that of a person about to approach an unpredictable animal.

 

“I’m okay,” she gasped out, tapping the speed down further until she was only walking. “I’m too tired to freak out on you.”

 

Fin smiled. “I hear that.” He waited for a second until her breathing had slowed. “Listen, Liv. I got a call from the local police in Buenos Aires. They have Elena Douglas, but she’s saying nothin’ and fighting extradition before her lawyer has even been contacted. They’ll get her back here eventually, but it’s not going to be in time to do anything for Elliot, even if she knows somethin’.”

 

Olivia wiped a shaky hand over her forehead, feeling the beads of sweat collect and press into her hair. “He’ll tell me. At nine. One way or the other.”

 

________________

 

At 8:37, Olivia stood on the roof, watching life proceed beneath her the way it did every day. Cars honking, people rushing to work or wherever the hell they were going. The sky was a crystalline blue and she thought briefly about how rarely she noticed things like that anymore.

 

How rarely she even looked up.

 

She’d finally forced herself up the stairs when she felt as if she couldn’t breathe inside anymore. Now she did what she’d been trying to delay for the better part of the past two hours. She pulled out her cell phone and dialed the number of the phone Elliot had with him. She had intended to wait until Mason actually told her where Elliot was before she called him, so that she’d be able to give him concrete good news for the first time since the beginning of this odyssey.

 

However, her brain was shutting down, the inevitable result of mental strain and chronic sleep deprivation. All logic had departed a little before eight, which meant that she was now operating on raw emotion. It wasn’t a place she felt comfortable at all, but it didn’t matter, since none of this was her choice. She was too tired to even worry about her lack of restraint, so she dialed.

 

Four rings.

 

Then Mason’s voice. “You’ve reached Mason Douglas. Leave a message, and I’ll return your call as soon as possible.”

 

Beep.

 

Without even pushing the end call button, Olivia held her phone at arm’s length, staring at it as if it were a toxic substance. Not once, through each agonizing minute she’d forced herself to wait, told herself she could call when she knew for sure, had it occurred to her that Elliot wouldn’t answer. That he could have passed the point where he was at least capable of lifting the phone, flipping it open, and pushing a button. So she could hear his voice and maybe the suffocating sensation that pressed against her chest would lift for one small merciful moment.

 

But he didn’t answer.

 

After a minute, the phone disconnected itself and the display went dark. She quietly pocketed it and stood absolutely still. The singular feeling that overcame her resembled nothing else in her emotional repertoire. If someone had asked her, before this moment, if she understood desperation, she would have said yes without a second’s hesitation. She knew what that meant, didn’t she? She’d felt it with Maria Recinos. The impotent rage and helplessness that came with total lack of power.

 

But that had been nothing in comparison to the psychotic clash of thoughts, images, and emotions that assaulted her now. Her confused mind wandered back to Professor Walter’s class.

 

 _Imagine, in detail, what your life would be like without the presence of the person you most value. Then write it down_.

 

Olivia sank to the ground, her back pressed against the brick wall. It should have hurt, but physical pain didn’t register at all anymore.

 

Again, her mind played the tape of Elliot in interrogation, on any one of a hundred cases, reclined in a chair after they’d performed an especially ass-kicking good cop/bad cop routine. She watched him smile at her (probably saying something insulting) and throw his coffee cup. She realized now that she’d never followed the cup itself. She’d always kept her eyes on his face, waiting for the one-in-twenty when he nailed the trashcan and for the briefest segment of time, grinned like the ten-year-old boy she had never known.

 

She realized a lot of things. Now. And the fact that most of them sounded in her head as if they should have been crumpled into fortune cookies didn’t make them any less true.

 

Olivia rubbed her palms against the concrete, embedding tiny rocks and pieces of dirt in the flesh of her hands. The problem was that no one ever came up to you and announced: _This is the last time you will ever see the person standing before you. Be sure you remember to say everything that’s important_.

 

She couldn’t even remember what he’d been wearing the last time she saw him. Couldn’t remember what they’d last eaten together. Couldn’t remember the content of their last conversation. She didn’t know when they’d last gone out for a beer. Didn’t know when they’d last played cards at 2 a.m. while waiting for a warrant. She wasn’t even sure of the last time their eyes had done that thing where they hung on a millisecond too long, and then both she and Elliot instantly pretended that nothing was different. That they hadn’t, if only for a segment of time too microscopic to measure, taken a dizzying risk.

 

What she did remember, in IMAX detail, were all the things she should have said and hadn’t.

 

_When you walked away from me outside that little girl’s hospital room, I couldn’t breathe._

_Oregon sucked. I dreamed about you. All the time._

_I hate you for getting Kathy knocked up again._

_You’re a complete jackass when you don’t get enough sleep._

_I think the reason we never touch each other is that we’re scared of what would happen if we did._

_When you get too close to me now, I feel dizzy. That’s why I don’t let you._

From the second she’d walked into the precinct yesterday, seen Elliot’s empty desk, and known instinctively that something was wrong, Olivia had been determined not to cry. Crying was a waste of time and energy. It accomplished nothing. It wouldn’t get her more information about Elliot or help him hold up stranded in the middle of nowhere.

 

She looked at her watch. 8:45. Even if Mason told her the truth as he’d promised, there was no guarantee they could get to Elliot in time.

 

She hugged her legs to her chest and cupped her ankles with her fingers, squeezing until in some location that seemed very far away from her, there was pain. Then she laid her forehead against her knees and sobbed.

 

________________

 

At the precise instant the second hand on the bullpen clock hit nine, Olivia opened the door to interrogation, her cheeks still damp and shiny with tears. She took three steps to the table and leaned forward until her face was about a foot away from Mason’s.

 

“Where. Is. He?”

 

_________________

 

Less than an hour later, Olivia sat in the back of a MedEvac chopper that had set down in a remote section of Adirondack State Park. Her head pounded, her mouth felt as is she’d ingested ashes, and her pulse was so quick that it almost made her nervous, but she figured that if she passed out, one of the guys in the front seat would know how to revive her. Everything around her was bright green in the sunlight -- close to blinding, actually.

 

Suddenly she heard a blast of static from the radio in the front, and a disembodied voice drifting through the air. “We’ve got him. Severe dehydration, probable concussion and his ankle has a nasty break, but he’ll be fine once we get an IV in him. Kepler’s hooking him up now. We’ll have him to you within ten.”

 

One of the guys in the front (James? Jason? He had told her. . . ) pushed a button and replied, “Good. We’ll be waiting.” Then he glanced back at Olivia and said with a grin, “You hear that? He’s fine. I told you they’d have him in no time.”

 

Since there was zero chance that any sound would come out of her throat, Olivia merely nodded, sinking back into the abrasive fabric of her seat. Her skin throbbed where the seatbelt had sliced into her hip, but she hadn’t noticed until just now. She squeezed her fingers together for something to do while she waited, and as she did so, her blurry eyes landed on the face of her watch.

 

The second hand was black instead of red like the one in the bullpen, and it moved smoothly around the small circle, rather than in sudden jerks. Olivia’s eyes tracked the tiny black line, fascinated as for the first time in over twenty-four hours, time prepared to give her something back, rather than take it away. While this particular ten minutes seemed unbearably long in its own unique way, the waiting was no longer more than she could take. She watched each circle, grateful for the support of her seatback; she didn’t trust that she would have been vertical otherwise.

 

When the black line had gone around eight times, she saw an ambulance pull into view from behind the line of tall evergreens. The pilot looked over his shoulder and said, above the hum of the propeller as he started up again, “It’ll be quicker if you stay buckled. They’ll put him right next to you when they transfer him.”

 

When the back doors of the ambulance opened, time twisted. Stopped making sense. In her mind, events became a slideshow instead of a movie.

 

A man and a woman, carefully unloading a stretcher that looked, even from the small distance, like nothing but an expanse of white, while another woman held IV apparatus and walked next to them.

 

The buckle of her own seatbelt, silver and shiny in her lap. The willpower it took to keep herself from touching it. Her hand clutched in a ball, slid behind her back to reduce temptation.

 

The stretcher suddenly landing only feet away from her.

 

Elliot’s face. White. Peaceful. _Alive_.

 

She didn’t want to blink, or move, or breathe, because if she disturbed anything, she might wake up and discover that this was a dream, too. The whole sequence of events seemed so fully disconnected from reality that only the persistent pain in her hip kept her convinced that she was probably conscious.

 

The EMTs buzzed around Elliot, checking the IV fluid, taking his pulse, blood pressure, and temperature. Olivia absorbed nothing of the rapid-fire exchange of medical terminology that passed among them, but everything about their body language and demeanor reinforced what James or Jason had said.

 

She’d gotten there in time.

 

 _He’s not going to die._ The words floated back and forth inside her mind as if they were on the tip of a sorcerer’s wand as it wove an intricate spell in the air.

_He’s not going to die_.

 

The frantic checking seemed to be over. Two of the EMTs jumped out of the helicopter, leaving only one woman, who quickly belted herself in across from the stretcher and smiled at Olivia. “You’re his partner?”

 

“Yeah.” The single syllable made Olivia cough.

 

“I’m Jen. Your Captain called. He said you’d be riding along and to make sure that you didn’t wind up on one of these, too.” The young woman tilted her head at the stretcher. When Olivia didn’t reply, she continued. “I’m here to keep tabs on him, but despite what he might look like, his chances are virtually a hundred percent.” She pulled off the latex gloves she’d been wearing and tossed them into a biohazard container a few feet away. “His body needs to rest while the fluids get to work, but I doubt he’ll be unconscious for more than a couple of hours.”

 

Jen paused. “Are you all right?”

 

Olivia felt her stomach drop as the chopper lifted into the air. “Fine. Thanks.”

 

The EMT glanced curiously from Elliot’s motionless form to Olivia’s face. “You know you can touch him, right? As long as you don’t bump the IV, you’re fine.” When Olivia didn’t respond, Jen shifted in her chair and looked silently out the window.

 

The trees shrank rapidly beneath them, and Olivia watched the sunlight bounce off an asymmetrical lake. After five deep breaths, she turned back toward Elliot; the middle of his stretcher wasn’t more than a foot away from her.

 

In close to nine years, she had never seen him so pale, but aside from that, he looked exactly as he might have passed out in the crib after they’d been on a case for twenty-four or thirty-six hours. It still didn’t quite register with her that after every _what if_ that had haunted her since Mason had taken him, he was right here, breathing quietly and evenly. She watched the sheet rise up and down with the movement of his chest.

 

She wanted him to open his eyes.

 

Slowly, she reached out and wrapped her hand around his wrist. Her thumb pressed on the bone she could feel just under his skin, and his pulse tapped lightly but firmly against the pads of her fingers.

 

With her hand still holding tightly to Elliot’s arm, she sat back in her seat and closed her eyes. Imprinted on the darkness, she saw circles, surrounded by an ambient glow that reminded her of halos. The clock. Her watch. Elliot’s wrist, warm and vibrant in the ring of her hand.

 

________________

 

At first he thought he was dead.

 

When he opened his eyes, he could barely make out the objects around him, and he’d read too many stories where fuzzy eyesight was an indication that you’d entered the afterlife. But after a minute, he realized that first, dead people didn’t have IVs, and second, he couldn’t see very well because someone had turned down the lights in his hospital room.

 

He’d been in hospitals often enough to place the sounds once he knew their appropriate category. The pulse of the monitor that must have been on the wall behind his head, somewhere above him. The soft rush of air through the ventilation system, always louder in hospitals than anywhere else. The drip of liquid into the IV attached to his left arm. The surgical tape already itched where it held the needle in place.

 

But there was something else.

 

He turned his head, squinting to bring more of the semi-darkness into focus, and saw Olivia, asleep in the chair that sat squashed into one corner of the room, angled so that he had a full view of her from the side. One of her knees was drawn up to her chest, and the other one had probably started out there, but that leg now dangled over the chair’s wooden arm. He smiled when he noticed that her feet were bare.

 

She mumbled something he couldn’t make out and drew her other leg back up, as if being that unguarded, even in sleep, made her nervous. Since she was obviously passed out and couldn’t catch him doing it, Elliot allowed his eyes to travel slowly over her body in a way he never would have permitted had she been conscious. For a second he felt guilty, but it passed quickly. He was tired of being good, always doing what he was supposed to do.

 

Sitting in that car, wondering if he was in the middle of his last few hours of consciousness and still not sure what he thought about the afterlife, he’d suddenly understood just how long his list of regrets was.

 

Too long.

 

And one of them was always looking away when he caught himself with his eyes on his partner for longer than the rules of human engagement allowed coworkers. In that car, he hadn’t been sure he’d see her again at all.

 

 _So fuck it_.

 

Still, the funniest thing about his whole mental process was the trajectory his eyes ultimately took. Yes, he noticed the way her shirt had pulled up over her jeans, leaving a few inches of space where he could see the exact place where her waist met her ribs. Yes, he appreciated the outline of her breast and the contour of her collarbone. But mostly, he hurried through all of that, his eyes traveling quickly until they came to rest on her face.

 

She looked exhausted. Exhausted in a way he knew he’d never witnessed, and he knew why. Because he’d felt the same thing. The sensation that he was losing something he didn’t even comprehend. It made him furious, sad, desperate, angry, and strangely penitent.

 

Penitent, because she was always there, and most of the time he treated her like shit. Now, drinking in the details of her face as if he hadn’t been looking at it every day for over eight years, he wished he knew why. Why he couldn’t stop himself from striking when she got too close. Why it was so much easier to say something he knew would cut, or pretend to misinterpret her, than it was to stand there and let her look at him. Hear her voice when it was warm and laughing rather than distant and safe.

 

He vaguely wondered if the drugs they’d given him had disabled the safeguards that usually prevented his thoughts from wandering in this direction. Probably not. He felt remarkably lucid.

 

Out of nowhere, Uncle Jack’s voice.

 

 _If you could have one thing - one thing in this entire world, what would it be_?

 

The answer, at least in this moment, uncompromisingly clear.

 

What he wanted, more than anything, was for Olivia to open her eyes.

 

He cleared his throat, his vocal cords unpredictable after so much disuse. When he spoke, his voice was scratchy. Gravelly. And hopefully loud enough.

 

“Liv?”


	8. Chapter 8

Partner I know we could be soul to soul if we want to

Oh ain’t it worth it there’s so little lovin’ today

Wastin’ our feelings on something when so little matters

Think of the time and the chances we’re throwing away

~~~~Kris Kristofferson: Between Heaven and Here

 

________________

 

Olivia didn’t stir when he spoke, and he almost said her name again but checked himself at the last second, relaxing into the uncomfortably hard hospital bed mattress so that he could study her for a few more seconds before she woke up with her magical defenses instantly intact.

 

Her lips were raw and chapped, and as he scanned her face more carefully, he noticed that her eyes were red and chafed at the outer edges. Her cheeks were pale and blotchy, and the deep purple circles underneath her eyes complimented the red adjacent to them.

 

Elliot lay very still for awhile, considering, for the first time since this ordeal had begun, what it might have been like to experience the past two days from her end of the lens, rather than his. What it would have been like to have her instantaneously disappear from his life, with no guarantee that she’d ever return. How he would have felt as he waited, hour after hour, for information that didn’t come.

 

She must have called. After he lost consciousness. She would have called to say that someone was coming.

 

And he hadn’t picked up.

 

 _Shit_. He cleared his throat and spoke again, louder this time. “Liv?”

 

She sat up abruptly in the chair, instantly alert, her bare feet slapping the tile floor as Elliot watched her fight to recall where she was. After a split second her eyes connected with his and stayed there, quietly watching his face as the tension in her expression eased. Her hands relinquished their death grip on the arms of the chair (he was surprised she didn’t have splinters), and she leaned backwards into the cheap plastic covering.

 

“Hey,” she said softly. “How do you feel?”

 

He didn’t want to talk about how he felt, at least not physically, but he knew she’d spent the better part of two days going out of her mind with worry, so he figured he could humor her for a few sentences. “Good. Fine. They must have given me enough pain meds to kill me, because I can’t even feel the ankle.”

 

Olivia suppressed a yawn. “Actually, I don’t think they gave you that much. I was too tired to hear most of it, but the doctor talked to me before I crashed, and he said the fluid levels were their first concern. They gave you a tiny bit of something, but nothing heavy duty. Thought it might make you more nauseous.”

 

Elliot nodded, glancing around the dimly lit room. “I feel a hell of a lot better than I did in that car. Still a little shaky. What about you?”

 

She looked surprised by the question. “What about me? I’m fine.”

 

“Save it, Olivia. I heard you on the phone. How long have you been asleep?”

 

She laughed, and the sound of it made the back of his neck feel funny and warm; it reminded him of his dream, when he hadn’t been able to hear her laugh, and he had wanted to. So badly.

 

“I have no idea,” she said, stretching her legs in front of her. “I was so focused on getting you in here, and when they finally had you hooked up to everything, I couldn’t stay awake anymore. I meant to go home once you were settled. Guess I didn’t quite make it.”

 

“I’m glad you didn’t,” he muttered softly.

 

Even through the murky fluorescent light, he could see her flush, but she ignored him and stood up. “Now that I’m conscious, I should go. I’m sure they have lots of Jello to feed you.” Her attempt at humor clearly did nothing but increase her discomfort, and she added quickly, “I’ll check back in before visiting hours are over.” She reached for her purse, which sat on the stand beside his bed, and turned toward the door.

 

“Olivia.”

 

She stopped with her palm resting on the cool metal handle. “Yeah?”

 

“Can you wait five minutes?”

 

His voice held something tentative yet terrifying; she knew instinctively that regardless of what he was going to say, she wasn’t ready to hear it. She studied the textured pattern of ivory paint on the back of the door, the microscopic little bumps, wondering why all the resolutions she had made when she’d thought he might be dead vanished so easily the instant she was in the same room with him. Up on that roof, with her head on her knees and her tears making it impossible to see a foot in front of her face, she had been so sure that she wanted to rattle off to him the list of things she knew she should have said.

 

Now, she wanted to hit the door in ten seconds or less, greet Elliot across the desk in a few days, and file the dangerous list somewhere deep in her subconscious.

 

But she might as well get it over with. She knew the tone well enough to be aware he wasn’t about to drop it.

 

“Sure. Why?”

 

He shifted in his bed, the IV line swaying where it connected to the shiny silver pole. After a second he found what he was looking for -- the remote control for the bed. He scanned it briefly before pushing a button, and then the head of his bed rose from the fully reclined position until he was halfway sitting up. After rearranging his pillows, he dropped the remote control on the reflective polyester and looked at Olivia again, his eyes exhausted and yet filled with an odd, determined light.

 

“I just-“ He broke off, looking down at the antiseptic white sheets that covered his legs. “Had a lot of time to think out there.”

 

“That can’t be good.” She meant for her tone to remain light, but the way her voice cracked on the word “good” blew that plan. _Shit_. She didn’t want to do this now. Maybe never.

 

“You know what?” His voice had an edge of anger to it now, and Olivia pressed the bones of her spinal column more firmly into the back of her chair. “Screw it. I had this whole lead-up planned, but it worked a lot better when I was hallucinating.” He rubbed his eyes, shaking his head slightly as if that might drop the words into the formation he desired.

 

“While I was out there? I dreamed about you. A lot.” He watched her face, the way she struggled to keep her expression from giving anything away. “And not the kind of dreams where we solve a really important case or you promise to do my paperwork for a month because I made you a truly impressive paper clip chain.”

 

“Elliot-“

 

“No. No ‘Elliot’ this time, Liv. I almost died. And you know what I was thinking? That I’m an even bigger jackass than I thought I was, which given the way my life has been going lately is saying something.”

 

She bit her lip, the ends of her fingers pulsing with a weird charge. “I just think-“

 

He cut her off. “Yeah. We both do. Too much. You think we should talk about this later, right? We’ve been talking about it later for two years. Maybe it’s the low blood sugar, but I’ve decided that later is now.”

 

She looked at the place where the white hem of his sheet met the dull plastic of his bed frame and said nothing. All the words that had spiraled their way through her mind on the roof gathered inside her mouth, as if preparing to mount an offensive. She set her jaw even harder, trying not to consider the peculiar image of how it would look if the phrases were actually there and she swallowed them.

 

“I dreamed that you were in bed with me.” He mumbled the words so softly that they almost seemed to vanish before they floated across the few feet between his bed and her chair. But she was way too skilled at hearing him to get lucky enough to miss a syllable this time.

 

“Shit, Elliot.”

 

“No,” he said softly, wishing that words weren’t so stupid, wishing that he could take the image in his mind and transfer it directly into hers, so all the risks of communication disconnect would vanish and he would know, without an atom of doubt, that she understood what he was trying to tell her.

 

But he couldn’t, so he pushed forward, agonizingly aware that each word leaving his mouth could never be pulled back again, and that the consequences of what he was doing were nauseatingly unpredictable, despite how well he knew her. “Not like that. We weren’t. . . “ He started in a different place. “You smelled like coffee.”

 

“What?”

 

He continued, more forcefully this time. “I said you smelled like coffee. You were sleeping, and I was touching you everywhere, because I knew that when you woke up, you’d leave, and I wanted to remember.”

 

She sighed. “Everybody has dreams like that. It doesn’t mean anything. I once dreamed that I slept with my track coach. And the guy in those mattress commercials.”

 

“You’re not listening,” Elliot replied. He almost smiled at himself, amazed that he wasn’t more angry at her. An unnatural calm had settled over him, as if now that he was determined to get this out there, he’d already thrown the dice, and where they landed was now authoritatively beyond his control.

 

“I am,” she whispered, finally. “I just don’t know what to say.”

 

“Tell me what you thought about while I was gone.”

 

_I thought that if you died, I wasn’t sure I’d ever make it out of bed in the morning. That last time I called you, and the phone was ringing and you didn’t answer, I prayed. And I don’t even really believe in God._

 

“I thought there was a lot of crap I would have said to you if I’d known you were about to die out in the middle of nowhere.” _Where the hell had that come from?_ She’d meant to say something like _I thought a lot about how sleep deprivation sucks_.

 

“Such as?” He fixed her with a stare so focused that she had a moment of sympathy for everyone who had ever faced off against him in interrogation.

 

“I hate you for getting Kathy pregnant.”

 

“Makes two of us,” he shot back.

 

“So why did you?” Olivia wondered vaguely where her impulse control had gone, and thought that maybe she should be heading down to the snack shop to try and find it rather than having this chat with Elliot.

 

“Doesn’t matter,” he replied quietly. “It’s got nothing to do with what we’re talking about here.”

 

“The hell it doesn’t!” Her voice was becoming shrill, and she hated that sound _so_ much. She took a long, deep breath and curled her toes, jamming them against the icy tile under her chair. _Don’t let him get you rambling. Short, concise answers until he lets up. Then run like hell._

 

“You’re thinking about how to get the hell out of here, aren’t you?” Elliot flashed her the unbelievably irritating smirk he wore whenever he was deeply convinced that he was right and everybody else was wrong.

 

“No.”

 

“You’re such a crappy liar.”

 

Hearing the echo of Casey’s voice in the air, Olivia sagged back into the barely padded chair and tried not to smile. “So I’ve been told a lot lately.”

 

“Well it’s true.”

 

She didn’t reply, and quiet crept slowly into the tiny room, barely noticeable at first, but gradually gaining strength until it seemed as if Olivia noticed every audio vibration within a half-mile radius. The squeak of a cart wheeling past outside. The PA system beyond the closed door, paging Dr. Something or Other. The beep of the monitor, counting Elliot’s heartbeats. Her throat was closing again, and all she wanted was to teleport somewhere where she could stop having that sensation every two minutes.

 

Elliot stared at her, aware that the combination of his unwavering gaze and the unbreakable silence was making her more uneasy by the second, but he didn’t give a crap. Her hair was wavy and tousled from being pressed against the hospital chair, and he remembered the way it had smelled and felt in his dream, how liberating it had been to allow himself to think about it. Touch it. Without the guilt or the rationalizations.

 

For years, Elliot had frequently spent large portions of his day in silence and never given it a moment’s thought. Silence in the bullpen? He’d been able to go for hours working across from Olivia without even looking up at her, simply aware that she was there, doing whatever it was she was supposed to be doing for the case. Knowing that if she needed something, she’d ask. Silence on a stakeout? No problem. If he had something to say, he’d said it, but most of the time he didn’t, so he sat there and looked out the window, listening to Olivia breathe or chew her gum or whatever the hell she happened to be doing. And he never once considered that he should be grateful the silence was easy to live with, that it didn’t feel cold, cavernous, bitter, angry, or laced with accusation.

 

This silence, the one he was forcing himself to endure right now, was filled with something new.

 

No. Not new. Not at all. It was only that being trapped in that car, with nothing to do but think and reconsider a high percentage of his life choices, had taught him the label, the name for what he felt right now.

 

Longing.

 

It was a feeling he’d never had in his entire life, and he didn’t like it very much. Still didn’t make it go away.

 

He finally spoke, not because he couldn’t have allowed the silence to continue (part of him took perverse enjoyment in watching Olivia this uncomfortable, because it meant he wasn’t the only one with a problem), but because he honestly wanted her to answer his question.

 

“Why can’t we talk anymore, Liv?”

 

“We’re talking right now.” Her voice sounded funny.

 

“Stop pretending you don’t know what I mean.”

 

Something in her eyes shifted, and Elliot thought fleetingly that he should be careful what he wished for.

 

“Okay,” she said evenly, leaning forward with her hands on her knees. “What do you think’s gonna happen if we take this conversation to its logical conclusion? Is that a place you want to be? I _tried_ to talk to you, Elliot. After Gitano. You weren’t listening. At all.” She shoved a piece of hair out of her face.

 

“I was scared,” he replied, his tone so matter of fact that Olivia thought she might have misheard him.

 

“Maybe they gave you more pain meds than I thought,” she muttered, glancing down at the skin on the back of her hands, which was flaking off from the constant washing she’d been doing over the past few days -- one of the many things she’d done to pretend she was busy. To pretend that she hadn’t been in the process of incrementally losing her mind.

 

“It’s not the pain meds. It’s not. I wish I felt the same way about you that I did eight years ago. I’d put myself there in an instant if I could snap my fingers and do it.” He paused. “I can’t.”

 

“Me neither.” It slipped out before she could snatch it back, and she thought that if she took a tally, today would probably be the winner for the day when she said out loud the greatest number of things she should have kept to herself. Her eyes felt itchy, and she cursed herself for not leaving when she’d had the chance. Her hand had been on the damn door. One turn of the lever. . .

 

“So what now?” Elliot asked softly, pushing himself up even further in bed and fumbling again for the control that would make him more vertical.

 

“Nothing now!” she exclaimed, standing up so suddenly that the blood rushed from her head and she sat back down again, very quickly.

 

Elliot leaned forward. “You okay?”

 

“Fine,” she snapped irritably. “Don’t pull out your IV. I just got up too fast.”

 

He chewed on the inside of his lip so that he wouldn’t smile. “You were saying?”

 

Suddenly she was so tired that she wasn’t even sure she could stand up again if she wanted to. “I don’t know. Really. What the hell? I just-“ She ran her hands through her hair and they caught where it tangled. “Don’t know where this is coming from.”

 

“Yeah you do,” he murmured, and she hated him for the way his voice made her spinal column feel prickly when he spoke that way.

 

“Okay. Fine. Neither one of us feels entirely partnerly about the other anymore. So what? We _work_ together, Elliot. And even if we didn’t, the two of us? Think about it for ten seconds. We’re like oil and water. We’d kill each other inside a week. So this conversation is making both of us uncomfortable for no good reason. Can we drop it and go back to work?” She put her hand to her temple, feeling as if someone was stabbing an ice pick into her skull. As if she’d had way too much wine without the fun of actually ingesting any.

 

What he wanted to say was this: _I don’t fucking WANT to drop it. It’s too hard now, sitting across a desk from you and never talking unless you ask me question about a case. It’s too hard, because I fucking miss you. We’re not even friends anymore, and I don’t want to watch you across the desk and wonder where you’re going at night and what you sleep in and what you’re watching on TV and what it would be like to sit next to you on the couch and be able to put my hand on the inside of your thigh. I want to put my hands on you whether I’m supposed to want that or not, and if you keep sitting there, five feet away across the goddamn desk, someday I’m just gonna do it._

However, he said only, “Yeah. Sure. You’re probably right.” His voice was taut and for a terrifying second, he wondered if it was going to crack, if he might cry, right there while she sat looking at him with something so close to pity that he halfway felt like smacking her.

 

“Probably,” she said uncertainly, fishing under the chair for her shoes, into which she jammed her feet, glancing anywhere but at him. Finally she stood and forced herself to meet his eyes, which were fixed on her face. “I’m gonna go home and crash for awhile. The doctor said you’ll be out of here by tomorrow evening. I’ll pick you up if you want.”

 

“No,” he answered, way too quickly, and he watched her flinch as if she’d been slapped. Still, he had to hand it to her that her facial expression didn’t change at all. “I’ll call Maureen. She’s around.”

 

“Fine.” Her voice was flat, empty of an expression at all, and Elliot experienced a wave of self-hatred so intense he wished he could bottle the force of it.

 

Olivia grabbed her purse and took a few steps toward the door before reversing course for a moment. “So I’ll see you at work in a couple days then. I don’t know the details, but Fin mentioned something about finding some information in the car where Douglas left you. He’s still not talking.”

 

“Yeah. I’ll see you at work.” He echoed her words, too enervated to create his own.

 

Her voice thick, she said very softly, “Take care of yourself, okay, El? Everything else aside, the past two days have been the worst of my life.”

 

The door clicked, then slammed, and she was gone before even a word could appear in his brain, let alone a complete collection of them. A thought. As he listened to her footsteps fade down the hallway, Elliot realized that it was back again. That nagging sense of absence. Longing.

 

Void.

 

And when she had been there, even pissed off and irritating as hell, the void had been gone.

 

________________

 

A little before nine p.m., Olivia pushed open the door to her apartment. The hinges creaked slightly, as they probably did every time she shoved the door open or shut, but she’d never before slowed down enough to observe the sound. Through the wall, she heard the muffled laughter of the retired couple next door. They’d moved in a few months ago, and Olivia recalled her astonishment when she’d answered the door one evening to find Ray standing there with a loaf of zucchini bread, explaining that he liked to cook now that he had some free time on his hands. Now, on the rare occasions when she was home early enough to walk down the hallway during Ray and Ellen’s dinner hour, the entire floor inevitably smelled warm, inviting.

 

 _Real_.

 

Nothing like the stale coffee and terror she constantly breathed at the 1-6.

 

Olivia hadn’t been back to her apartment since the morning Elliot vanished. Now, through the fog of physical exhaustion and emotional strain, she surveyed the place she called “home” (not because it felt that way, but because she didn’t know a better word for it) as a disinterested observer, rather than ignoring her surroundings as she usually did and heading straight into the bedroom to fall asleep so she could forget her recent conversation with Elliot.

 

Everything was so _clean_.

 

No dishes in the sink. No clothes tossed on the back of the couch. No stack of mail on the counter, waiting to be sorted through and categorized according to importance. No magazines or books on the coffee table (Did she have a book on her bedside table? She was almost sure there had to be _one_ there). No beer bottles in the recycling bin. Just a couple of Diet Cokes, flavored seltzers, and the cardboard from a package of organic macaroni and cheese.

 

She opened the cupboard, took out a glass, and filled it with water, drinking its entire contents in one breath. As she automatically reached for the dishwasher, she stopped herself suddenly and set the glass on the counter with a determined smack. Rubbing the back of her hand over her forehead, she exhaled audibly as she stood staring at the glass. _That’ll show them, Olivia. Leave the water glass on the counter. Way to be a rebel_.

 

Her mind drifted to Elliot’s apartment as it had looked when she walked through searching for clues in the moments before he called. The lived-in clutter, the sense that a real human being actually inhabited the place. Even though he was alone, he had pictures of his kids on the wall behind the couch, and some candid snapshots (along with a calendar that was two months behind) tacked to a corkboard in his kitchen.

 

Disgusted with herself, she jammed the glass into the dishwasher, slammed the door shut so hard that she heard the dishes inside jar against one another, and walked down the short hallway to her bedroom, peeling her shirt off as she moved.

 

Elliot’s voice, vibrating in her head. _While I was out there? I dreamed about you. A lot._ She stopped next to her bed and pulled off her jeans and her bra, tossing them into the laundry basket in her closet. Opening the top drawer of her dresser, she rummaged until she found a black tank top, which she yanked over her head with excessive force.

 

_I dreamed that you were in bed with me._

 

She walked into the bathroom, the frosty tile startling against her bare feet. Twisting the faucet all the way to cold, she held her hair out of the way with one hand and rubbed the freezing water all over her skin with the other, all the while wishing she had the power to turn off Elliot’s voice in her head as easily as she could turn off the tap.

 

 _I dreamed that you were in bed with me_.

 

She should have stayed in Oregon.

 

She should have taken a job with the FBI, walked away from SVU, and forgotten all this crap. Out of nowhere, she remembered the way her entire body had gone shaky when she stood at that phone booth, unconsciously holding her breath because she thought Elliot was about to come on the line. She remembered the way she had felt on the roof not twenty-four hours ago, the sense that, if Elliot didn’t come back, something inside her would just. . . . shit. She didn’t know. She didn’t know what she had thought would happen. She knew only that whatever it was had been so unimaginable that the mere idea of it had caused her to put her head on her knees and sob until breathing was difficult – something she had done maybe once before in her life. Maybe.

 

Olivia squeezed a huge glob of toothpaste onto her green toothbrush, idly contemplating the way the little red stripe in the middle curved as she severed the paste from the tube. Sticking the toothbrush in her mouth, she scrubbed viciously at each tooth in turn; maybe focusing on the small things would shut her mind off for a blessed five-second respite.

 

 _You smelled like coffee_. Or maybe not. _Shit_. Apparently the Other Stuff compartment was either permanently out of commission or the door didn’t shut anymore. She brushed her teeth until her gums ached, but Elliot’s voice still floated back and forth, like a ribbon twisting just out of her reach.

 

She knew what he smelled like. Coffee, too, most of the time. The barely present touch of pine that never left him and his clothes, even when he wasn’t in the room. In Oregon, when she’d walked outside at night, she’d breathed in the pine trees again and again, as if by inhaling deeply enough she might make it hurt less, the separation she felt as acutely as if there had been a physical explanation for it.

 

Of course, she’d never told him any of this.

 

 _You smelled like coffee. You were sleeping, and I was touching you everywhere, because I knew that when you woke up, you’d leave, and I wanted to remember_. Olivia closed her eyes, and if she hadn’t been holding her toothbrush, she would have pressed her hands over her ears, too. If only she were four again, when shutting out the noise actually entailed the possibility of closing off the thoughts that accompanied it.

 

She rinsed her mouth, several times, then clicked off the bathroom light and walked back into her bedroom. Shooting a glance at the end table, she observed with bizarre relief that there was in fact a book sitting there. Of course, in the semi-darkness she couldn’t see the title, and she didn’t remember, but she tried not to consider what that revealed about her life.

 

Slipping beneath the covers, she listened to the voices from the TV next door drifting through her wall, loud enough for her to catch the tone but not the words. A comedy, because she could hear the laugh track. She stared at the ceiling, thinking that at the current moment, her own life could use a laugh track.

 

 _I was touching you everywhere. . . .I wanted to remember_. Fuck fuck fuck. It was useless. She closed her eyes and thought about Elliot’s hands on her body. His fingers tracing the curves of her ribs. Moving gently over the arc of her jaw until they reached her ear. Pushing her hair away from her neck. His hands on her stomach, just hard enough not to tickle. Sliding over the rise of her hip. Resting on the inside of her thigh.

 

Yeah. This was _exactly_ what the Other Stuff compartment was for. Sweaty and irritable now, she kicked off the covers and rolled over, shoving her arms underneath her pillow. Her eyes were dry and prickly with exhaustion, but she knew she wasn’t going to sleep.

 

If only this. . . this _thing_ with her and Elliot were just about sex. She sighed. That she could have dealt with. Well, honestly, she’d been dealing with it ever since Kathy left him and the ground underneath her relocated without her permission. She considered what she would have said to Elliot in the hospital a few hours ago if for once she’d had the courage to tell him the truth.

 

_The problem is that I want to have permission to touch you, to let you touch me, but that’s not enough. Whenever I’m around you now, I just. . . want to be around you more. And more. It doesn’t stop. I hate that we can’t even have a conversation anymore without either screaming at each other or lapsing into single syllables because we’re so fucking uncomfortable. And when you disappeared I suddenly realized that you didn’t know any of this._

 

Olivia opened her eyes again and looked at the tiny luminous halo thrown up by the night-light she never would have confessed to keeping in her bedroom. She’d bought it three days into the job, and never turned it off at night since. It was a blue and green butterfly – not her choice, but the only one they’d had at the store that particular day. She wondered what Elliot would say about the night light in her room. What it would be like to roll over before she went to sleep and have him right there, talking to her about a case he’d worked that day, the latest twist in the health care crisis, the current plan for drawdown of the troops in Iraq, or the fact that they were out of beer.

 

_You could call him. In the hospital. And tell him._

_Right now._

 

But she didn’t.

 

Instead she lay there, her eyes open long after the television next door fell silent. She gazed at the stupid butterfly and didn’t even notice when her tears made the light wiggle and blur.


	9. Chapter 9

So I ran like the wind to the water

Please don't leave me again I cried

And I threw bitter tears at the ocean

But all that came back was the tide

~~~~Sarah McLachlan: I Will Not Forget You

 

________________

 

When Olivia awoke the next morning to the smell of something delicious and indefinably comforting, it took her a moment to remember that last night, for the first time since she’d bought the damn thing two years ago, she’d used the timer function on her coffee pot. It had only taken her about five minutes to abandon her initial efforts to sleep, given the combined force of the stress hormones coursing through her body and Elliot’s voice playing in her head like an out of control airport loudspeaker. So she’d crawled out of bed, pulled on a pair of sweats, and sat down at her desk to rummage through her very orderly file drawer until she found the impressively undamaged manila folder marked “instruction booklets.” Behind the one for the bagless vacuum cleaner and the DVD player she had yet to remove from the box was the one for the coffeemaker. She’d extracted it, flipped through the index until she found “Setting the Timer,” and then walked into the kitchen, still reading, which probably accounted for the fact that she’d bashed her toe into a pair of shoes she’d left sitting near the counter. The knowledge that one thing in her apartment was in the wrong place made the dull throbbing and impending bruise more than worth it.

 

She glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand. 7:45. She sighed loudly as she reached a hand back to massage the huge knot in her shoulder. It must have been there before this morning, but she hadn’t noticed. Cragen had told her to take today off. Sleep. Unwind. Debrief. Get some perspective. Even she had assumed that with her level of exhaustion, she’d be out until at least noon. Now she studied the alarm clock’s mocking green lines, their diagonals zooming in and out of focus as she blinked. 7:46.

 

She wondered if Elliot was awake. She wondered when they’d let him come back to work. She wondered how long he’d have to ride a desk because of the cast on his ankle.

 

She wondered who she’d have to fuck to prevent Elliot from being the first thing she thought about every single morning of her life.

 

Finally, she wondered what the hell Mason Douglas had done with his daughter, and that’s what ultimately motivated her to push back the wrinkled navy blue sheets, warm and comforting against her hand, pull on the pair of sweats from last night (which were now in a fuzzy puddle on the floor), and move toward the kitchen so she could discover whether or not the timer function on her excessively expensive coffeemaker had actually produced a decent cup of coffee.

 

_________________

 

“Didn’t I tell you to stay home today?” Cragen surveyed Olivia from his chair, the stripes on his shirt partially obscured by the large stack of files that sat just left of center on his desk.

 

“Captain-“

 

He went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “Yeah. I have a clear recollection of saying that I didn’t want to see you in here until tomorrow at the earliest.” He reached for his mug of coffee and started to raise it to his lips, then set it suddenly back down on the desk. “Let me guess. You want to go head to head with Mason Douglas about the daughter.”

 

“If he’ll tell anyone, it’s me,” she said quietly, pressing the tips of her fingers together.

 

Cragen leaned back in his chair and stared at her, his face still etched with exhaustion. He grabbed a pencil from his desktop and tapped it against the palm of his hand while Olivia listened to the copier swishing rhythmically in the other room. This one, a new model that had only been in the bullpen for about a month, was both faster and quieter then its predecessor. Olivia missed the predictable cadence of the old one, though she couldn’t have articulated why.

 

After a full minute Cragen said irritably, “You’re probably right. Go talk to him. But I’ll be standing right outside the door, so don’t throw him over the table or put his head into the wall.”

 

Olivia wished she had the energy to smile, but even the three cups of coffee she’d already ingested couldn’t shake the lethargy that now blanketed her. “I’ll only break his finger,” she replied tiredly, turning in the direction of the bullpen so that she could get yet another cup of crappy coffee.

 

_________________

 

When Olivia walked into interrogation, her first observation was that Mason Douglas looked like an entirely different human being than he had the last time they’d met. He’d had a shower and a shave, and clearly at least a little bit of sleep, but the difference went beyond that. Rather than fidgeting, shifting, and generally exhibiting the behavior of someone mainlining caffeine, he sat quietly in the wooden chair, neither slumping nor leaning forward. He held a coffee cup in one hand, but he seemed in no hurry to finish its contents.

 

He nodded at her as she walked inside. “Detective Benson. How’s Elliot?”

 

She pulled out the chair across from him and sat down, swallowing another sip of coffee before she said evenly, “He’s fine. They’ll keep him in the hospital for another day or so, and then he’ll have to limp around until the ankle heals up.”

 

“Good. That’s great to hear.”

 

“I’m sure. You’re clear on the murder charge. That has to be a relief.”

 

Mason’s face sobered. “I’d play verbal tennis with you if I were more motivated, but I’m not. Think what you like, but I never wanted to kill him.”

 

Olivia shrugged and reached for her coffee again, transiently amused by how fully she had returned to the caffeine habit in two days’ time. “Whatever you say. I’m not interested in Elliot at the moment anyway.”

 

Douglas raised an eyebrow. “Oh, right. You seemed supremely uninterested when your Captain had to prevent you from removing my lungs using your fingernails instead of a scalpel.”

 

Olivia’s fingers tightened on the handle of her coffee mug, but she didn’t take the bait. “Let’s stick to Meredith. Our ADA already wants to provide shock therapy to certain generally covered parts of your anatomy for the stunt you pulled with Detective Stabler. You want to piss her off even more by refusing to tell me what you did with your daughter?”

 

Mason leaned forward slightly, holding his Styrofoam coffee cup with both hands. “Look. I realize you’re trained to take fifty different approaches with me, and you’ve probably consulted your friendly shrink regarding the best method to get me to talk. But here’s the thing.” He pushed his coffee cup to the side, as if it were obstructing his ability to express himself. “My daughter is safe. She’s a lot safer than she’d be if I let you get hold of her. I realize you’ve got absolutely no reason to trust me on that, given what I just did to your partner, but it’s still the truth.”

 

Olivia eyed him thoughtfully. “So your plan is to go to jail for the rest of your life and let Meredith take her chances, wherever she is?”

 

Mason smiled, just a little, his expression enigmatic. “I’m not going to jail.”

 

“Really? It usually takes people a few more days in custody to become delusional.” She flashed him her most obnoxious smile.

 

He took a long swallow of coffee. “My bet is that I’ll be out of here within fifteen minutes.”

 

Olivia stilled, observing Mason’s calm, the concrete conviction in his voice. She didn’t want to admit it, but it unnerved her – gave her the sensation that he knew something she didn’t. But she cleared her throat and tried to get back on track. “Well that’s a nice fantasy, Mr. Douglas. Still, between the NYPD and the FBI, I don’t think we’ll be missing your company anytime soon.” She stood up and pushed the chair back under the table. “You’re not even a little worried that your ten year old daughter is somewhere out there without either one of her parents? With you in custody here and her mother in custody in Argentina?”

 

Mason stood up and dropped his empty coffee cup into the trashcan. “Detective Benson. This entire thing, from the moment I kidnapped your partner, was a huge mistake.” He paused, as if considering whether or not to say more. “I don’t make a lot of mistakes, but maybe all the little ones I managed to avoid for years somehow caught up with me this time. I took a stupid gamble and it failed. None of this has anything to do with the NYPD or really even with my daughter. Elliot and Meredith got caught in the undertow of something I should never have allowed to get so out of hand.” He looked up at the clock.

 

Olivia stepped toward him, becoming more irritated by the moment. “Well that’s particularly fun and cryptic, but-“ The distinctive click of the interrogation room door cut her off. Cragen stepped in quickly, followed by two men wearing drab suits and sporting unnaturally shiny shoes.

 

“Detective Benson,” said Cragen, his voice flat and almost fully devoid of expression. “These are agents Paulson and McGinnis. They’re from the NSA, and they’ll be taking custody of Mr. Douglas, effective immediately.”

 

Olivia shot a look at Mason; he simply shrugged as if to say, _I told you so_. Her eyes darted back to Cragen. “You’re joking, right? What the hell? He kidnapped Elliot. We have no idea where his daughter is.”

 

“Meredith Douglas is in our custody,” replied Agent McGinnis.

 

A wash of electric red anger rose up past Olivia’s chest, moving so rapidly she could feel it sweeping into her scalp within seconds. “So we just forget about the fact that he almost killed Elliot? What about Casey’s-“

 

“That will be all, Detective,” snapped Cragen, so crisply that even Olivia, who was accustomed to his fits of pique, paused for a split second. Cragen continued, more quietly. “Mr. Douglas, I’ll have the desk sergeant get your belongings. Olivia, wait for me in my office.”

 

“You’re going to let them just-“ She couldn’t seem to shut up, but Cragen’s voice truncated her statement for what must have been the fifth time that morning, even though it was barely ten a.m.

 

“My office. Go _now_.” After one more deep breath, Olivia finally managed to start herself in the direction of the door. She paused briefly as she walked past Mason. His eyes met hers and he said softly, “I am sorry. For what I put you through. And your partner. It wasn’t-“

 

“I know. Intentional. Right.” She shook her head and walked out, her feet moving toward Cragen’s office as her mind spun in vertiginous circles, trying to grab the various threads of this story and weave them into one another in a way that made sense. But any sense of cohesion eluded her, so she dropped into the chair across from Cragen’s desk, suddenly so tired that her head felt heavy, idly wondering if she’d get to be the one to explain to Elliot why they’d just released the man who had almost been responsible for his death.

 

________________

 

Elliot lay in a semi-reclining position, his head and shoulders relaxed against the scratchy antiseptic whiteness of the hospital-issue pillowcase. Had it not been for the clock on the table next to his bed, he wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what time it was, given that he’d somehow managed to score a room with no window. The chilly fluorescent glow in here was the same twenty-four hours a day.

 

He wanted to get the hell out.

 

Aside from a lingering headache and the presence of a cumbersome cast on his right ankle, he felt physically fine. What was _not_ fine was being forced, yet again, to sit for hour after hour, alone with his own thoughts. And this time, unlike in the woods, he didn’t even have the fun of occasional hallucinations to liven things up or offer him an excuse for the strange pathways his mind decided to wander down whenever he dropped his guard for a tenth of a second.

 

When he’d opened his eyes that morning, he’d experienced that strange sensation where you know with deep certainty that something is bothering you, but you’re not awake enough yet to flip through your mental filing system and figure out what it is. He’d stared at the ceiling for a good minute and a half, thinking that he really had to pee, before he finally realized what was bugging the shit out of him.

 

Olivia.

 

Now that he’d had a few hours to squish his thoughts around like silly putty, he understood that in brief, he was a fucking idiot. What had he thought was going to happen when and if he finally made it back to the city in one piece? _Hey Liv! I almost died and while I was out there dehydrating, I finally decided to drop the bullshit pretence that I’m not uncontrollably attracted to you._ Yeah. He could see it now – her face if he dropped that one on her. Even his halting, pathetic attempt to explain his dream had put her in defense mode so quickly he was surprised he didn’t need to add whiplash to his list of injuries.

 

The problem was that he needed to act instead of think. Get back to work. Go to the gym. Hit the library and get some goddamn books or something. Anything that would bounce him out of this thought pattern he could almost feel wearing grooves in his brain.

 

He rubbed his hands over the stubble on his cheeks, letting his eyes slowly sweep the impersonal slice of space surrounding him. Barely off-white walls. Foggy panels covering the glowing tubes within them. Shiny machines performing their various functions. In this room, there wasn’t even the attempt to make the place look homey. No shitty “art” on the walls. No dusty fake flowers in blue plastic vases.

 

Emptiness. Void.

 

He looked over at the chair that faced his bed, the air inside it exactly like any other air. Now. But last night. . .

 

Abruptly, Elliot realized that he finally understood why Uncle Jack’s question had mystified him. He’d never allowed himself to want. It had always seemed so wasteful. Silly. Unnecessary. And useless. What was the point of wanting something when you knew beyond a doubt that it could never be yours? When they were kids, his friends had constantly fantasized about saving up enough money for a Harley Davidson or an electric guitar.

 

Elliot had always kept his wants anchored firmly within the realm of reason.

 

A roast beef sandwich. A hand-me-down bike. Colored pencils for the drawings he made in his room on rainy afternoons -- the ones he kept well hidden so his father would never discover them. When he’d asked Kathy out on a date and she’d said yes, even that had seemed like a minor miracle, because what girl would want to go out with him?

 

He’d always been so careful not to overreach, amused by guys who got upset when their wives gained twenty pounds or nagged them for spending too much money or coming home late from work. Elliot had always kept his expectations scrupulously low, and consequently, life hadn’t disappointed him too often.

 

Kathy, of course, was the exception. He sighed now at his own ignorance, because probably it had worked in his head something like this: if I don’t expect much from her, she probably doesn’t expect all that much from me, either. But if he’d learned anything over the past few years, it was that even when you could finish someone’s sentences ninety-five percent of the time, she could shock the shit out of you the other five percent.

 

And five percent was more than enough.

 

If things with Olivia had been bad before Mason Douglas knocked him over the head and shoved him into the trunk, they were even worse now. Elliot didn’t have the slightest sense of where he stood with her. He only knew that he’d been swimming upstream for so long that even if his mind had the will to continue, his body had given up the fight.

 

The phone rang, mercifully startling him out of this latest attack of introspection. He stretched to pick it up off the table, grimacing at the way his out-of-use muscles protested even the smallest exertion.

 

“Stabler.”

 

“Hey.” Her voice drifted through the little round dots of the receiver, and Elliot contemplated whether it was possible for one’s body to tense up and relax at the same time. Probably not. Still felt that way.

 

“Hey.” _I thought you were going to come by this morning_. “What’s going on?”

 

She was quiet on the other end of the line, and after a beat Elliot said, “Liv, you okay?”

 

“Fine. I’m just wishing that Munch had gotten the short straw when we drew for who got to call you.”

 

He could tell that the attempted mirth in her voice was forced. “Why? What happened now?”

 

“The NSA came and took Mason Douglas about half an hour ago. They filled out all the appropriate forms in triplicate and the case is now fully beyond our jurisdiction. I’m just waiting for Casey to get here. Munch _did_ get to call her.”

 

Because he knew she couldn’t see, Elliot fiercely balled his free hand into a fist and ground it into the sheet until the friction hurt his knuckles. “What about Meredith?”

 

“They’ve got her. I have no idea what the hell happened there, but she was with the NSA in Buenos Aires when they went to pick up Elena Douglas.”

 

“They’ve got the wife, too? What the-”

 

“I know. Cragen’s so pissed I think he actually got on the treadmill.” Olivia took an audible breath. “But it’s over. Done. Finished.”

 

He knew she was referring to the Douglas case, but her words felt like tiny hammers on the inside of Elliot’s skull. So much for the subsiding headache. “Finished. Yeah.” He rubbed his fingers into his left temple. _Time to change the subject_. “I’m being discharged this afternoon. Maureen’s gonna pick me up and buy some groceries.”

 

“El, if you need me to come by and help with something, I’m pretty much doing paperwork here, so I could-“

 

“No.” The word felt larger than two letters and one syllable to him. He tried it again anyway. “No. Aside from the stupid cast, I’m pretty much fine. No need for you to go out of your way. I’m sure you’re tired.” _What the fuck are you saying? You want her to come over to badly someone’s going to have to sedate you in a minute. What the hell is wrong with you?_ But he muddled on. “The doctor says I need to stay off my feet for another twenty-four hours, so I’ll see you at work on Thursday.”

 

“Okay then.” She was back to receptionist voice. He wanted her voice the way it had been on the phone in that damn Ford in the middle of nowhere.

 

The way it had been in his dream.

 

He felt like hitting things, but there was nothing in the room that wasn’t either breakable, expensive, or both. She cleared her throat, her voice louder and more decisive now. “See you Thursday. Bye.”

 

“Bye.” The word departed his lips automatically, and he flinched at the menacing click that crackled through the speaker when she severed the connection. He replaced the receiver in its cradle and looked toward the wall, toward the place where one would expect a window to be. But of course there wasn’t a window, so he sat quietly for a long time, contemplating the unbroken white expanse, and realizing that there was a lot to be said for not wanting things.

 

When you wanted nothing and got what you wanted, the outcome was absolutely painless.

 

And this was anything but.

 

________________

 

On the bright, sunny Thursday when Elliot returned to work, Olivia was determined to get there first, steeled for his entrance with a full cup of coffee, an organized work area, and at least fifteen minutes of settling in time before he walked in the door. She hated the fact that, by this point, simply being around him made her restless and jittery; she figured it was mostly a byproduct of so much time spent in panic mode, and that it would probably subside within a few days once they got back into a rhythm. By the time he arrived at 8:15, she’d been working for almost an hour.

 

“I wanted to bring you some coffee,” he said quietly, as the rubber smack of his crutches paved a pathway of sound past her desk. “But I couldn’t carry it. Sorry.” He awkwardly propped the crutches against the edge of the desk and lowered himself carefully into his chair, his right leg sticking out in front of him, a white, corporeal reminder of everything he was fucking up in his life.

 

“It’s okay. I’ve probably had too much already.” She smiled politely, distantly. The smile she gave the guy at the hot dog stand where they used to alternate picking up the tab. Elliot wished he could just go home and crawl back under the covers. So far, the best part of his morning was the part before he became conscious.

 

_Go to work. Forget this crap._

 

He reached forward and picked up the single folder centered on his desk. Olivia hadn’t moved a thing, he noticed. Even the pen he’d used the night before his unplanned excursion was sitting sideways by his empty coffee mug. The logo on it said Adventist Health Systems, and he wondered where the hell he’d inherited that particular writing implement. For a ridiculous second, he wanted to leave it because she had left it, because he instinctively knew that she hadn’t been able to bring herself to touch a thing on his desk.

 

He knew this because if their roles had been reversed, he would have gone postal if someone had so much as changed the angle of her computer display. _Goddamnit_.

 

 _Go to work. Forget this crap_.

 

He picked up both the pen and the folder. “What’s this?” he asked, nodding toward the folder in his hand.

 

Olivia glanced up from the paperwork she was reading. “New case. Vic was raped and strangled early yesterday morning. Looks like she was out jogging. Munch and Fin did some legwork and interviews yesterday, but the Captain wants us running interrogations this afternoon.” She opened her desk drawer, lifting and moving its contents until she pulled out a small yellow chunk of sticky notes. “You can read the file, but my money’s on the boyfriend. They were having trouble, and she was funding his budding recording career. Probably thought his meal ticket was on its way out and couldn’t deal with it.” She scribbled something on the top sticky note and affixed it to the paper she’d been reading. “He doesn’t have an alibi, and he certainly would have known her usual jogging route.”

 

“Yeah,” Elliot replied. A small segment of his brain was processing every word that she said, already preparing to apply the information to the file he was about to open. But the rest of him couldn’t get past the waves of. . . he searched for the word. Joy? Relief? Euphoria? Two days ago he’d been slipping in and out of consciousness, dreaming about her, quite convinced that he was never going to see her again. Now she sat across the desk from him, smelling like coffee and that fucking coconut shower gel that made him want to put his fingers over the deep red buttons on the front of her shirt and. . .

 

_Shit._

 

And she was acting as if none of it had ever happened.

 

_Go to work. Forget this crap._

 

“Elliot. Are you with me here? You’re sure you’re okay to be back?”

 

Her expression  -- the kind of concern you have when a relative of an acquaintance has a heart attack -- made him want to have an hour-long date with the heavy bag, but he said only, “Fine. Yeah. Give me a few to catch up here and we can get going.” He opened the file and, by sheer force of will, focused on the minute black marks that blanketed the white page before him.

 

_________________

 

 

“I don’t think it was the boyfriend,” said Elliot suddenly, looking up for the first time in over half an hour.

 

“Why not?”

 

“Think about what you said. She was his meal ticket. If he wants a recording career, why’s he gonna bump off the woman who was paying for it? Plus, whoever killed her cut her both pre and post-mortem. None of the interviews Munch and Fin did give any indication that this Nichols guy had any sort of problem with violence or impulse control.”

 

Olivia studied him, her body unnaturally still. “And that means he’s off our list? How many times have we seen someone snap when he feels threatened?”

 

“What about her boss?” Elliot shot back. He could feel the irrational anger building somewhere in his chest cavity. Why did she always have to be so insanely calm? He drew in a breath and continued, forcing his voice to remain even. “She was up for a promotion. They didn’t get along. The guy knew she went running every day before work. And he’s got a prior conviction for assault.”

 

“Ten years ago!” exclaimed Olivia. “Did you read the whole file, Elliot? He has an alibi.”

 

Elliot’s face flushed, and he fought the urge to say something awful, just for the satisfaction of wiping the superior smirk off her face. Instead he said, “The man’s bartender girlfriend? Definitely rock solid.”

 

“So now she’s a shitty alibi just because she doesn’t work on Wall Street? What the hell is up with you today?” Olivia tossed her pen onto the desk with such force that it bounced and twirled before settling next to her paper clip holder.

 

“Nothing,” Elliot muttered.

 

“Okay then.” She glared at him for a second before dropping her eyes back to the file open on her desk.

 

Elliot followed suit, pretending to read, his eyes already blurring because his ankle hurt like a sonofabitch. He’d decided to skip the pain meds that morning, since they made him feel lightheaded and sluggish; he regretted that call already. No matter how he shifted in his seat, he couldn’t get comfortable. He also desperately wanted another cup of coffee, but he wasn’t about to start the trek across the room again by himself (even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to carry the cup back to his desk), and he’d be damned if he was going to ask _her_ to get him some.

 

The phone rang and he snatched it immediately, grateful for the distraction.

 

“Stabler.” He paused. “Yeah, okay. We’ll be right there.” He put the phone down and pushed himself out of the chair. “The boss and his lawyer are in Interrogation Three. You coming?”

 

“Yeah.” She shoved her chair back so hard that it smacked into the file cabinet under her computer. Then she stood and followed him down the hall, remaining a step or two behind, even though with him on crutches, she could have caught him effortlessly.

 

_________________

 

When Elliot cut her off mid-sentence for the fourth time in less than ten minutes, Olivia quietly excused herself from the room. She walked quickly back to the bullpen and stood before a tall black filing cabinet. Opening the second drawer, she flipped through the files until she located the one that she was looking for. She pulled out a thick, blank white form labeled “TRANSFER REQUEST.” She wondered why it had to scream at her in capital letters, as if she weren’t already aware of the enormity of what she was about to do. Scanning it as she returned to her desk, she sat down, retrieved her pen from where it had landed by the paper clips, and began to write.

 

_________________

 

At ten p.m., the bullpen was quiet and uncharacteristically peaceful. No ringing phones, no slamming of thumbtacks into a corkboard in order to create a graphic representation of a case’s details. No Cragen storming out of his office in a fury about someone’s incompetence or the fact that the janitor had forgotten to put toilet paper in the men’s restroom.

 

Quiet, filled only with the soothing hum of various electronic devices.

 

Olivia sat at her desk, gazing at Elliot’s jacket where it hung off-center on the back of his chair. Despite the quiet, the room for her seemed filled with sound, with the presence of a thousand former conversations.

 

The totality of her life here.

 

Laughter, arguments, joking insults, barbed comments thrown out in fits of unbearable exhaustion and emotional strain.

 

And late-night quiet moments exactly like this one, when she and Elliot were the only ones left in the room. When he’d reached into his drawer and pulled out a Snickers, handing it to her without comment, because it was two in the morning and they both knew they’d be there for the rest of the night. When she’d looked up to find him face down on his desk, asleep on the file he was supposed to be reading, and she’d watched him for a minute, never daring to classify what it was that she felt. Knowing only that in that moment, no matter how brutal the case, despite the fact that she was so tired she kept losing her train of thought in the middle of a sentence or having to reread the same paragraph three times before she had the slightest clue what it said, she didn’t want to be anywhere but here, quietly working through the possible angles of the case while she snuck an occasional glance at Elliot’s face, relaxed in sleep in a way it never was when he was conscious.

 

“I thought you’d left.” Elliot’s voice startled her back into the present; she was surprised she hadn’t heard the rubber squish of his crutches.

 

“I was waiting to talk to you.” She had promised herself that she’d say it straight out this time. No circling the issue even for five seconds.

 

Elliot stood by her desk, propping his crutches at an angle to make sure they didn’t fall. “You’re leaving.” He stared at her, his jaw set.

 

“How did you-“

 

“Give me a little credit, Liv. You disappeared in the middle of an interrogation. I saw the look on your face. Besides, this isn’t exactly a first. How long until you rejoin us this time?” He carefully navigated the corner of his desk and lowered himself slowly into his chair. One of the wheels emitted a grating squeak before he stopped moving.

 

“I’m not. Rejoining you,” she replied quietly, breathing in deeply as if doing so had any chance of diminishing the surreal horror of the conversation unfolding before them. “Cragen said it was a three strikes you’re out sort of deal.”

 

“Okay.” Approximately two hundred and fifty-three responses wanted to morph themselves into words and split open the silence, but Elliot kept his mouth firmly shut, determined that for once, he wasn’t going to let the anger and despair he could feel vibrating through every cell in his body guide his reactions.

 

Olivia regarded him silently, noticing the way his lips were white around the edges. “You want a cup of coffee?” she said unexpectedly.

 

Coffee actually sounded incredible right now. Something hot and tangible to hold onto while Olivia sat there and hacked his life further into pieces. “Yeah. Thanks.”

 

She reached across the desk for his mug, and he smelled the coconut body wash again, its scent muted after a long day of slowly wearing off, but still inescapably there. He watched her back as she walked to the coffee pot, the half-light in the squad room bouncing off the microscopic wrinkles in her blouse. After a minute he heard the thud of his mug on his desk. He took a swallow and didn’t even flinch when the bitter liquid scalded the back of his tongue.

 

“So,” he said, his voice louder than he’d meant for it to be. He turned the volume down a notch. “At least you gave me a head’s up this time. Do I get an explanation, too? And if you’re going to say it’s because I cut you off in interrogation, don’t. That’s bullshit.”

 

Olivia pulled a paper clip from the black magnetized holder and moved it back and forth between her fingers. After a few seconds she looked up at Elliot and said evenly, “How long did it take us to start fighting when you came back to work today? I mean in relationship to the number of sentences exchanged. Ten seconds? Twenty?” She twisted the paper clip out of shape; it was on its way to forming an S curve. “We distract each other, Elliot. We have ever since Gitano, and for some reason I’m sure neither of us can explain, we keep thinking that if we try hard enough, we’ll stop doing it.” She pulled the paper clip even further apart, until it was a single line broken only by a few tiny wire curves. “But we don’t.”

 

“We distract each other because we disagree about a case?” His voice was rising again, and he placed his palm carefully on his jeans, his fingers grasping the denim for lack of something else to hold onto. “We’ve fought about cases since the minute you got here, Liv.”

 

“Maybe. But it was always about the case. Always. No baggage. Now it’s about _us_ , Elliot. We fight for the sake of fighting. For a while it was interesting and I think maybe we even got off on it, but I’m done. I’m too tired. Today in interrogation I realized that I’m not doing this for the rest of my life.” She stuck her stretched out paper clip back into the holder, watching the way its pointy metallic tip stuck out high above the others.

 

Elliot’s eyes circled her face slowly before they refocused on hers. His voice low and taut, he said, “So for the third time, I’ve got no input here?”

 

Exasperated, she slammed her hand down on the desk. “You can have input. Sure! I’ll listen. But all you’re going to do is list for me the reasons I should stay, and I’m not staying. I made a decision. When I’m compromising the quality of my work because I can’t focus, that’s a pretty clear signal that something needs to change.”

 

He leaned forward, and a wave of his distinctive pine scent washed over her. For a split second, she pictured herself outside her cabin in Oregon, long after midnight, sitting on the porch watching the stars, with her hands stuffed in the pockets of her hoodie and her mind fully occupied with preventing her from walking back inside and dialing Elliot’s number on the quaint cabin telephone.

 

“Okay, let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re right,” retorted Elliot, his words louder now. The coffeemaker let out a random gurgle. “You don’t think that before you pack up and head out to wherever the hell you’re going, we should spend ten minutes talking about what’s really going on here? Maybe ask ourselves why, after almost nine years of working together, we suddenly ‘distract’ each other so badly that we can’t do our jobs?”

 

“No. I don’t.”

 

“Just no? That’s it?” Both of his hands were pushing against the fabric of his jeans now; he was beginning to worry about what they might do if he moved them.

 

“Yeah. That’s it.” She stood up abruptly, reaching for the mouse to shut down her computer.

 

“Why? Why the hell do you get to decide that we’re not going to have that conversation? There are two of us in this room, Olivia. In theory, two of us in this partnership. I told you after the Sennet case that I was sick of you walking out. You’re doing it again. I want more than ‘We distract each other.’”

 

“You don’t know what the hell you want, Elliot,” she mumbled under her breath, grabbing her purse and fumbling through it in search of chapstick. Her lips were suddenly pasty and dry.

 

“What?” He stood up to face her, amazingly quickly given the cast, and although pain lanced through his ankle from the sudden pressure, he was barely aware of it.

 

“Nothing. Forget it. I’m exhausted and I’m going home. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She didn’t even look at him again as she grabbed her coat from the rack and slammed through the double doors.

 

Elliot wasn’t sure how long he stood there, listening to the intermittent drip of the coffeemaker and staring at the straightened paper clip Olivia had shoved into the holder on her desk. When the pain in his ankle finally registered again, he realized that a fine film of sweat now covered his neck and forehead. He slowly sat down, leaned his head against the back of his chair, and closed his eyes.

 

 _You don’t know what the hell you want, Elliot_.

 

But he did, with an aching clarity he had no idea how to process, and he was only now beginning to comprehend the consequences of violating the rule he’d followed since childhood.

 

 _You don’t know what the hell you want, Elliot_.

 

But he did.


	10. Chapter 10

I see you reaching for your keys

Looking for a reason not to leave

If you don't know if you should stay

If you don't say what's on your mind

Baby just breathe

There's nowhere else tonight we should be

You wanna make a memory?

~~~~Bon Jovi: (You Want To) Make a Memory

 

________________

 

Olivia had expected that the experience of surviving the two weeks following her transfer request would be something akin to having deep, precise paper cuts systematically applied to every square inch of her body, starting with her toes and ending at the top of her scalp. Then perhaps a dousing with rubbing alcohol to guarantee that the pain was acute enough.

 

Instead, from the second she walked into the precinct the morning following her confrontation with Elliot, she went through the motions of each day with a hallucinatory numbness that rendered her confused by its presence yet pathetically grateful for its power. For a day or two, Elliot lobbed the occasional jab, intended to slice, but it was as if she were rolling around in an impenetrable bubble. After his first few attempts failed to draw from her even a ‘drop-dead’ stare or a slammed door, he stopped trying, and by silent mutual assent they sank into something far beyond the borders of either the forced courtesy or the constant bitching they’d already experimented with for months. Olivia was vaguely aware that at some point she had to wake up, and when she did, whatever they were doing would hurt so terribly that she might not be able to move under the horrific weight of it.

 

For now, the unexplained anesthetic in her mind worked like a miracle drug, and she performed her job with a robotic efficiency she hadn’t achieved in years. She arrived every morning at six-thirty or seven, left hours after everyone else each night, and, when she wasn’t in interrogation or out at a crime scene, spoke so little that occasionally when she opened her mouth, she reacted the way you do when you hear your voice on tape.

 

As if it doesn’t belong to you.

 

Her conversations with Elliot consisted exclusively of exchanges such as:

 

_“Has Warner called you with the COD on Maggie Turner?”_

_“Not yet. She said by noon.”_

_“The outgoing calls on her cell indicate she made at least five attempts to reach her brother in the two hours before she was killed.”_

_“Guess we’d better talk to him then.”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“I’ll meet you in the car in fifteen minutes.”_

_“Fine.”_

-or­-

 

_“Why can’t I find a manila folder? Did Munch move the fucking box again?”_

_“No, Elliot. I put them away where they’re supposed to be. For once. Top drawer next to the filing cabinet.”_

_“Thanks.”_

 

Even at night, when she finally closed the apartment door behind her at eleven or midnight, her hands pressing the wood in a subconscious attempt to reassure herself that something in her life remained solid, she still wasn’t tired. She Mr. Cleaned the kitchen floor for the first time in over a year. She washed every article of clothing she owned (even the ones she had to soak in Woolite), then organized her closet by color because she couldn’t think of anything better to do. She watched cooking shows at two a.m. even though she despised both perky people and the culinary arts. While logic argued that at some point she had to hit the wall and crash, when she went to work the next day to repeat the whole process, she never even felt sleepy.

 

Not for ten seconds.

 

_________________

 

At seven p.m. on the night following Olivia’s final day at the 1-6, Elliot sat on his couch, a half-full bottle of tequila in his left hand. He seriously contemplated drinking the rest of it, lying down, and forgetting all about the party he was supposed to be attending at eight sharp. Despite the fog of melancholy that had darkened the precinct the moment the news of Olivia’s departure made the rounds, her farewell party itself had become a running joke within the 1-6, because nobody knew what to call the damn thing. It obviously wasn’t a retirement party. It wasn’t a going away party either, because she wasn’t going anywhere; she’d be working one floor down. Last he’d heard, Cragen had been verbally fencing with Munch over whether or not one could have a ‘transfer party.’

 

For Elliot, that conversation meshed perfectly with his opinion of the past two weeks. A bunch of words without meaning, stacked around him in the room while inside his head, the cacophony was so loud it must have been audible in Seattle or Guam.

 

Even the freak pedophiles and rapists decided to take a day off in honor of Olivia’s exit. Murphy’s Law dictated that on her final day, when the atmosphere within the bullpen was so thick Elliot was surprised they were all still breathing, nobody had caught a single case. In a job where events habitually transpired so quickly that twelve hours could pass without Elliot taking the briefest glance at his watch, time had naturally chosen that day to stand still. The tick of the black second hand on the bullpen clock exploded through the room, over and over, but even when it finally made a complete revolution, time nonetheless seemed to be drifting backward.

 

At five o’clock, Olivia quietly walked into the storage closet and came out with a small cardboard box. Elliot sat at his desk, his face channeling the guys carved on Mt. Rushmore, pretending to be in the process of diligently filling out paperwork and hoping Olivia wouldn’t notice that he’d been working on the same form for the past five hours. He listened as she placed the few personal items on her desk into the box, one by one. The “Cops Do It With Cuffs” mug Fin had bought her for Christmas a few years back. The 3x5 picture of her mother. The two gel pens with the squishy finger grips.

 

_Steal these Elliot, and I will kill you._

 

He wished her voice in his head had a goddamn off switch.

 

A photo of the entire squad, taken by some local news guy who had run a story on SVU last year. Elliot remembered clearly, because he’d been standing next to Munch and Casey when the photographer said, “Make sure partners are standing together. Easier identification for the readers.”

 

Reluctantly, he’d moved into position next to Olivia, careful to be sure that no part of his body was touching any part of hers, and thinking that two years ago, he would have been right there next to her without anybody having to ask.

 

For two weeks, Elliot had played an internal guessing game regarding which moment would make the slow agony of her departure most real for him. It turned out to be the sound of her computer powering down. He heard the mouse click, the few seconds of hesitation as the computer did whatever the hell computers do in preparation for shutting themselves off, and then. . . nothing.

 

The hum, the one that had been there across the desk from him every day for nine years, was gone.

 

The animated silence was his cue to stand up, ignore the slice of pain in his ankle, and say, “I have to pee. See you tonight.” He didn’t even meet her eyes as he headed for the door, cursing his crutches for preventing a quicker escape.

 

Now, dressed in a dark grey suit that made him feel like an absurd magazine version of himself, he put the bottle of tequila aside, rubbed his fingers over his eyes, and wondered how he was going to navigate the next five or six hours without turning into a complete ass. As he yanked on his tie, trying in vain to make it remotely comfortable, he caught sight of the picture sticking out of the stack of _Newsweeks_ he still hadn’t moved.

 

The picture Olivia had mentioned on the phone.

 

Despite the clear and forceful directives coming from his brain ( _Don’t pick it up, you fucking idiot. Leave it there. Get the hell out of here.)_ , his hand reached out and gently extracted the photo from the magazines. He relaxed into the couch, his eyes inhaling every detail of her appearance. The way her cheeks were flushed from having a few cocktails too many. The way her wine-colored dress wrapped itself around each curve of her body. The way her skin smelled like coconuts. . .

 

Okay, so maybe that wasn’t in the picture.

 

As the seconds expanded into minutes and Elliot continued to study the photograph, it occurred to him that for all the ways in which Olivia was wrong about him, them, and everything related to their relationship, in one respect she had encapsulated the whole train wreck in one word.

 

 _Complicated_.

 

Elliot wished that he could write off what he felt for her as lust. Lust was so basic, so quantifiable, and despite what most men would have liked their wives and girlfriends to believe, highly controllable. Yes, when he was honest with himself, he had to admit that he would have loved to feel Olivia’s skin, to know what it felt like to touch her however he wanted to.

 

Without rules.

 

But that was nothing beyond elementary biology; if it had ended there, he would have been fine. Anger management issues aside, Elliot possessed an above average amount of self-control, and he’d been married for twenty years without ever giving serious consideration to having sex with someone besides Kathy.

 

It would also have been easy to use some worn out phrase such as _Being with Olivia makes me happy_. But what kind of bullshit was that? Being around Olivia made him fucking miserable more than half the time, not to mention frustrated, angry, hostile, inarticulate, and bitter.

 

So it wasn’t that.

 

He threw the picture back on the coffee table and sank into the couch cushions, disturbed by how exhausted he was when he had yet to survive sixty seconds of this party.

 

He’d always been terrible at expressing himself, but at the moment, as he listened to the swish of his dishwasher, it seemed to him that what he knew about his feelings for Olivia could be condensed into an equation something like this: When she was there, no matter what the hell else was going on, even when all things considered he would have liked to smack her, there was still a space inside of him (however small) that offered escape.

 

Peace.

 

When she was gone, he’d hit bottom and keep on falling. He had the sensation that often came over him when he was a kid trying to put together a puzzle, and you get all the pieces with straight edges together to create the border, only to discover that no matter how hard you search, you simply can’t find the final tiny piece of cardboard required to close the square.

 

_________________

 

Olivia sat stiffly in the back of her cab, absently hoping she wouldn’t absorb the body odor that still lingered in the air, presumably from one of the back seat’s former occupants. The driver smelled overpoweringly of spicy cologne, and Olivia wished she’d eaten more than a strawberry milkshake for lunch, because her stomach was already doing that thing where she’d experience random ten second waves of debating whether or not she might vomit.

 

She gazed out the window, looking at the lights of the city at night, longing to resurrect the emotions they’d evoked in her as a child. She remembered that once, when she was six or seven, her mother had taken her to a show on Broadway. When she’d stumbled out of the darkened theater, clutching Serena’s hand to avoid getting lost in the crowd, she’d looked up at the omnipresent lights sparkling from every conceivable direction, and thought that nothing in the world could be more beautiful or more perfect than her city at night.

 

Now the lights flickered by her in a blur like one of those time-elapse movies they take of freeways, and she could think of only two things. One: the sad fact that her job had made it forever impossible for her to perceive the city as untaintedly beautiful again. Two: she would have been willing to work three weeks undercover as an ‘exotic dancer’ if it would have gotten her out of the party to which she was headed.

 

It took all her self-control not to open her mouth and tell the cab driver to turn around and take her home. She clenched her teeth together for added insurance.

 

Of course Cragen had insisted on throwing her a going away bash in the ballroom of some posh uptown hotel she’d never been to before. She’d spent an hour and a half getting ready, putting on pale pink lipstick and then rubbing it off in favor of the burgundy, trying on the three semi-decent dresses she owned and ultimately deciding that she hated all of them. She’d ended up in the midnight blue one, tugging it down over the stockings that made her legs feel itchy and constricted her already unsteady stomach. She’d started with her hair pulled back but finally figured that for one night, since she was leaving anyway, she could stop worrying about appearing too feminine. She didn’t have to bust down any doors or interrogate any suspects tonight, so fuck it.

 

Fundamentally, she felt like an idiot for the entire exercise, hating herself for not doing what she did every morning before work, when it was a twenty minute process to go from foot in the shower to foot out the door. Who was she trying to impress? An hour and a half of her life she’d never get back. She’d even searched the back of her cabinet until she found a still unopened bottle of perfume she’d bought on a whim last Christmas. She’d covered each individual pulse point with military precision, yet somehow every dab, intended as a method of armoring herself for the evening, instead had the paradoxical effect of making her feel increasingly naked, vulnerable, and terrified.

 

She should have thrown the fucking bottle in the trash.

 

The cab shifted abruptly and slowed as it moved toward the curb. Olivia automatically pressed several bills into the cab driver’s hand, murmured “Thank you” (or she was relatively sure she had), and stepped out in front of the hotel. Out of nowhere, George’s voice materialized in her head. _Olivia, when you’re in a situation that makes you uncomfortable, sometimes it’s useful to try to visualize the worst thing that could happen. Most of the time, doing this will help you realize that you’re allowing your mind to blow the event way out of proportion_.

 

Okay, George. Let’s try it your way.

 

_Well, I could make a complete ass of myself by breaking down in front of my coworkers. I could wind up sitting next to Elliot and after a few drinks I could blurt out, “You wanna know why I’m really leaving? Because I’m too damn tired of bashing my head against whatever this thing is that you and I have going now. Because I’m sure you’ve smelled good for nine years, but when I can spend nine minutes of every hour conjuring up various piney fantasies, it’s time to fold.”_

 

Yeah. That’d be terrific.

 

 _Fuck you, George_.

 

She sucked in the largest breath she could manage and, despite the fact that the air itself seemed to have acquired agency and started to press against her with surprising vigor, she forced her hand to reach forward and push open the door.

 

________________

 

Olivia sat at a large circular table beneath the expansive cathedral ceiling of the hotel ballroom, her eyes moving from one location to another, trying to absorb her surroundings. On the ceiling, the steady flow from the air ducts moved helium-filled balloons around in random patterns. Music floated from almost invisible speakers -- Ella Fitzgerald if she wasn’t mistaken. There were at least twenty tables in the room, all filled with people engaged in animated conversation. Olivia recognized perhaps seventy-five percent of them, but when she considered those she could readily name, that percentage crashed considerably.

 

On the plate before her sat the filet mignon, red potatoes sprinkled with dill, and fresh asparagus she vaguely recalled selecting from a menu Cragen had handed her last week. Not a single bite had found its way into her mouth, but she had to congratulate herself on the admirable job she’d done of reconfiguring the food in such a way that it appeared she’d eaten at least a third of it. Fin and Lake were engaged in a good-natured argument about some Yankees pitcher. Given that she’d spent the past ten minutes talking to Munch about a case he’d caught and she’d be no part of, Olivia was grateful to have three seconds of silence she might use to corral the exploding psychosis in her head.

 

“Are you remotely familiar with the definition of the word ‘party?’” Casey dropped into the seat next to Olivia, which had been vacated by Munch only seconds earlier.

 

“What?” For at least the tenth time that night, Olivia fought to return her thoughts from whatever unscheduled hiatus they’d taken and focus on a single conversation.

 

“I looked it up for you today because I figured you might not know,” replied Casey with a smart-assed smirk. “’Party. A social gathering especially for pleasure or amusement.’ It’s from the _American Heritage Dictionary_.”

 

“Shut up, Casey.” Olivia reached for her near-empty glass of wine and drained it in one large swallow. As if on cue, a black-clad server appeared beside her. Olivia watched as her glass slowly filled with the deep purple liquid and tried to remember how many glasses she’d already had. Two? Three?

 

“Where’s Elliot?” Casey lifted a piece of shredded carrot from the salad plate Munch had left behind and popped it into her mouth. She glanced around the room before looking back at Olivia, waiting expectantly.

 

“I have no idea. I think I saw him at the bar a couple minutes ago.” Against her better instincts, Olivia lifted her wine glass again.

 

“Have you talked to him at all tonight?” Casey stared at her, straight to the point as always, and the ubiquitous bluntness Olivia typically found refreshing seemed irritating as hell at present.

 

“Not really. He said ‘hi’ when he first got here.” She rubbed the back of her neck, picturing herself stretched out in bed, wearing a worn-in t-shirt and reading a good book. _Eyes on the prize. Another hour or so of this and you’re done_.

 

“Well, both of you look like I feel after that McKinnon asshole kicks my butt.” Casey signaled for the server, who materialized instantly; Olivia speculated on how much Cragen had convinced the department to cough up for the evening’s festivities.

 

“I’ll have a whiskey sour. And my friend here would like some cheesecake to accompany her wine. Can she get some raspberry topping with that?”

 

The server murmured, “Of course” and disappeared.

 

“I already had dessert,” Olivia tossed out, hoping to steer Casey away from anything related to Elliot.

 

“So what? You can have more. I’m sorry I’m late. I’ve had this blocked off on my calendar for over a week, and then Petrovsky called some emergency hearing on the Banfield case. I got out as soon as I could.”

 

“You haven’t missed anything,” Olivia muttered, reaching down to scratch her thigh where the stockings were really starting to piss her off.

 

“No speeches?” Casey shot her yet another evil grin.

 

“Do I have to move to another table?” Olivia gulped two large swallows of wine before abruptly depositing the glass back on the white tablecloth. “I think Cragen’s going to say something in a minute. Then I’m going home.”

 

The playfully combative expression left Casey’s face as if removed by a highly effective windshield wiper and was replaced with concern, something Olivia wanted to deal with even less.

 

“If you’re that upset about leaving-“ Casey’s question was interrupted by the arrival of her drink and Olivia’s unwanted dessert. When the server had moved out of earshot, Casey took a swallow of her cocktail, pushed the cheesecake in Olivia’s direction, and tried again. “Why’d you quit if you don’t want to leave?”

 

Olivia rubbed the fabric of her dress between her thumb and forefinger. “I do want to leave. I just hate parties.”

 

“Translation. You want me to shut the hell up. Got it.” Casey picked up a fork and sunk it into the abnormally large piece of cheesecake.

 

“No. It’s not-“

 

“Liv. Stop. There’s nothing I can say about this that you haven’t already thought of. Have some cheesecake, listen to Cragen’s speech, and go home. I’ll piss you off another time.” Casey extended a fork toward Olivia.

 

Olivia grabbed it and was about to follow Casey’s advice when she heard Cragen’s voice, loud and unmistakable despite the ambient buzz resulting from dozens of mingled conversations. “If everyone could pause for a minute, I’ll say my piece and you can all go back to enjoying the open bar,” he said sardonically. Still, his presence had the effect on an entire room that it did in the bullpen.

 

Silence reigned within seconds.

 

Cragen cleared his throat, and Olivia wrestled down the smile that rose in mutiny at the sight of her boss, all spit and polish in his navy suit, overhead lights reflecting off the smooth expanse of his scalp. He looked as uncomfortable as she felt, and something about this reassured her.

 

He continued, less stridently this time. “As anyone who works for me knows, it’s not customary for me to make speeches unless I’m ready to kick somebody’s ass. However, since Olivia has worked for me for almost nine years now, I owe it to her to say at least a couple things on her last day with us.”

 

 _Last day with us. Last day with us. Last day with us_. Cragen’s words succeeded where everything else about the last two weeks had failed.

 

_She was leaving._

_It was real_.

 

Underneath the table, Olivia wrapped her now-sweaty hands around the frame of the chair on each side, holding the icy metal and praying for something, though she wasn’t sure what.

 

“I’ll keep this short,” said Cragen, his voice uncharacteristically subdued. “When Olivia came to the 1-6, I have to admit I wasn’t sure she’d make it in Special Victims. She got so involved in each case that I kept expecting her to knock on my door and insist she couldn’t handle it anymore.” He paused, glancing around the tables, collecting his thoughts. “Obviously, I was wrong, and that doesn’t happen very often.” A sprinkle of laughter briefly spread through the room. “There’s not another person in our department who’s better at talking to victims, and filling her place will be difficult if not impossible.”

 

Fin, who had dropped into the seat next to her just before Cragen started speaking, knocked his elbow into hers and offered a half-smile. Olivia tried to make her mouth do the same, but she was sure that whatever expression resulted from her efforts wasn’t cutting it.

 

Cragen gave a short cough and resumed. “Before I embarrass myself or Olivia any more, I’ll wind this up so that everybody but me can take the edge off with another shot or two.” He looked directly at her then, his expression warm yet oddly pensive, as if his mind were working on a riddle he hadn’t quite been able to figure out yet. “The department won’t be the same without you. I’m sure I speak for everyone when I wish you good luck in computer crimes. They’re a lucky division. Cheers.”

 

He raised his glass of seltzer. Around the room, Olivia heard the music of intertwined voices echoing Cragen’s toast, each with varying pitch, volume, and intensity. She raised her own glass, tapping it against Fin’s and Casey’s, then reaching further across the table to Munch and Lake. The liquid blurred as it swirled with kinetic beauty in her glass, and for a second it reminded her of blood.

 

The countless crime scenes where she’d stood and watched in fascination as for a few moments, all the other colors mysteriously bleached and left only red. Red on the wall. Red on the floor. Red on the bed. Red in a perfect coagulated circle around the head of a seven-year-old little boy.

 

She blinked to refocus and realized that Munch was talking to her. “I’ve got the Crofton paperwork to finish first thing in the morning. We’re on for lunch next Thursday?”

 

“Yeah.” The syllable snuck out sounding relatively normal, and she exhaled in relief.

 

“Good.” He stood slowly, swallowing the last of his scotch as he reached for his jacket. “Don’t start reading my email now that you’ll have the magic password.”

 

Fin stood also, rolling his eyes. “You barely know how to use the damn email. What’s she gonna find in there?” When Munch ignored him he put his hand gently on Olivia’s shoulder. “Night, Liv. You know if you don’t drop by I’ll come and find you.”

 

Olivia thought that making a speech sound would probably be a good idea, but one didn’t seem forthcoming, so she simply nodded. Fin and Munch floated toward the exit, their images wiggly in the blurry mass that had become Olivia’s visual field. Fighting the sensation that her body suddenly weighed more than the heaviest metal in the universe (she’d forgotten the name of it -- she knew in high school), Olivia managed to push herself upright.

 

She already wished she’d gone with two glasses of wine instead of the four or five she’d probably had. The next ten or fifteen minutes dissolved into a collage of faces, each one stepping in front of her, saying words she pretended to acknowledge, though for what was getting through to her, everyone might as well have been speaking a long dead language.

 

Sanskrit, perhaps.

 

She clenched her stomach muscles, convinced that even if she hadn’t spoken to Elliot all night, he wouldn’t just leave. However, the mass of people quickly dissipated and before long she was standing alone at the table, looking at her wine glass (which had somehow become full again as she exchanged meaningless pleasantries with acquaintances, a pastime she put right up there with watching reality shows), trying to breathe, and reminding herself that the laws of human psychology dictated that, at some unknown point in the future, she’d stop feeling as if she were one of those people a few centuries ago, convicted to die by having massive stones slowly placed upon her chest, one by one, until her muscles simply couldn’t lift anymore and her compressed lungs were finally emptied of their last oxygen atom.

 

“Will you come have a drink with me at the bar?” Elliot’s voice was so close to her that she literally jumped, and he instinctively touched her forearm, just barely, his fingers sliding from her elbow to her wrist as she jerked away without meaning to, then cursed herself for acting like an idiot.

 

God they had awful timing.

 

He retracted his hand quickly and muttered something that might have been, “Sorry,” but was so quiet she couldn’t be sure.

 

She shook her head. “It’s okay. I’m jumpy. You know how I hate these things.”

 

“Yeah,” he replied, his eyes scanning her face with an expression that made her want to back up a few paces. “I do.”

 

She reached for her now-full glass of wine so that her hands would be occupied and said softly, “I thought you left awhile ago.”

 

Elliot laughed, if you could call it that. A horrible grating sound with no relationship to mirth. “I did. Leave.” He jammed his hands into the pockets of his jacket, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet like an anxious five year old. “I had the cab door open before I changed my mind and came back in.”

 

He paused, glancing around the almost deserted room, where balloons stuck to the ceiling in bubble gum colors, their shiny lined ribbons reflecting the refracted light from the globes dotting the ceiling at infuriatingly precise intervals. Elliot had the fleeting desire to reach up and move them, make them unbalanced and unpredictable like everything else in his life.

 

He picked at a piece of lint on his jacket. “Was that a yes or no on the drink?”

 

_Go home, Olivia. What the fuck would possess you to stay here until the stones are stacked to the ceiling but you miraculously keep respirating because you aren’t lucky enough to die?_

 

“Okay.” Inside her mind, she watched the red line on her self-hatred-o-meter rise with eerie rapidity. “One drink though. I’m beat.”

 

“So am I. One drink.” His words echoed hers and he trailed a few steps behind her as they made their way to the bar. She thought, as they reached the doorway with the brightly lit red ‘EXIT’ sign above it, that at least with him behind her, she couldn’t smell his cologne.

 

_________________

 

“Do you remember that Christmas when everybody ended up working for three days straight? You fell asleep in the crib, and Munch came in and twisted tinsel through your hair.” Elliot tipped back his bottle of Saranac before returning it to the smooth charcoal surface of the bar.

 

Olivia grinned. “It took me twenty minutes in the bathroom to get the crap out, and I was supposed to be in interrogation. Kinda hard to forget.” She moved her wine glass in a lazy circle, watching the golden liquid roll in waves against the edges of the goblet. She’d switched to white in hopes of warding off the headache she’d probably have anyway.

 

It was after midnight, and the bar was almost silent. Further down the rectangular counter, the bartender worked diligently with paper towels and disinfectant spray. The only other people remaining in the room were a couple Wall Street types in expensive suits, talking too loudly a few stools down from where Elliot and Olivia had been sitting for at least twenty minutes.

 

“Then there was the infamous platypus stakeout. I saved a lot of money by winning that bet.”

 

Elliot shook his head and swallowed another large gulp of beer. “They fucking lay eggs! The whole thing was rigged.”

 

“Oh shut up. You were doing pretty well at twenty questions before we got to that one. You kicked my butt with ‘tapir.’ You know what a tapir is but not a platypus?”

 

“There used to be something about a tapir in this book Elizabeth loved.” He paused, looking up at the neatly aligned bottles of booze, their labels a mural of melding colors. “Didn’t we get to the tapir right when all the radio stations fuzzed out except the one that was having a Backstreet Boys marathon?”

 

“Yeah. God that sucked.” Olivia brought her wine glass toward her lips automatically before realizing that if they were going to stay here much longer, she had to figure out something else to do with her hands if she didn’t want to be violently ill in the morning. She picked up a cocktail straw and smoothed her index finger over the cool plastic.

 

Elliot had fallen silent, still surveying the panorama of alcoholic offerings in front of him, so she took a moment to absorb his appearance. Even in the dim light of the bar she could see that he was pale. Stressed. Tired. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, and when her eyes drifted down to his hands, she noticed that his knuckles were scraped and bruised, indicating some brutal rounds with the heavy bag.

 

“So what made you turn around and come back in?” She bent the cocktail straw in half, wondering when her mouth had developed a will of its own.

 

His beer hit the counter with a dull thud and he turned in her direction so rapidly that his knees knocked briefly into hers. Ignoring the contact, he looked at her for a moment, then said quietly, “I’m not sure. Can’t seem to get rid of me, can you?”

 

She could feel the imaginary stones pressing slowly against her chest. “I wasn’t trying to get rid of you,” she murmured, fighting the urge to break eye contact.

 

“No? You left because you had the sudden urge to work computer crimes again?” As always when he felt cornered, his voice held anger, but this time there was something else, something even less controllable. Olivia couldn’t quite place it, but it vibrated around them until she could feel goosebumps rising on her arms, despite the warmth of the room.

 

She put her hand flat on the counter; it made a tiny fraction of her body cool. “We should probably go home, El.”

 

“No.” His hand landed on top of hers, anything but cool, and because she could count on one hand the number of times he’d touched her like that, a jolt crackled up her arm to the base of her scalp.

 

She kept her hand still, motionless under his, but looked directly at him, eyes wide and angry. “No?” Her calf itched insanely under her stockings but she ignored it. “You know, when I told you that we distract each other on the job now, you asked me why, but you didn’t disagree with me. Stop trying to make me feel guilty for finally doing the right thing.” She tried to withdraw her hand, but he pressed down harder, and even though his palm was sweaty, her hand stayed put.

 

“Move your hand, Elliot.” Her voice was so low that even the bartender wouldn’t have known she had spoken, but Elliot’s fingers were gone from hers before the second hand on his watch ticked again.

 

“I’m sorry.” He wiped his hand on the charcoal grey weave of his pants and stared at the floor for a few moments before raising his head.

 

“It’s okay. We both knew this would suck.” She did reach for her wine glass this time, another delicious swallow cascading down her throat. After a pause, she said softly, “Have you ever heard that Blue Rodeo song ‘Bad Timing’?”

 

Elliot coughed slightly as he tried to swallow his mouthful of beer. “Is that a rhetorical question? Never heard of them. Why?”

 

“No reason. I haven’t heard it for years and it came on the radio when I was trying to decide which stupid dress to wear.”

 

A mischievous light crept into Elliot’s eyes as he let them travel quickly over her dress, from the scooped neck to the midcalf hem that was now just below her knees. “You made a good call.” His voice was rough, and she wondered if there was an explanation in physics for the way certain sound vibrations could drill directly into your central nervous system.

 

She had goosebumps again. She hoped he didn’t notice.

 

“Why aren’t you going back to Kathy?” she blurted suddenly, contemplating when and how she had flicked off her self-edit switch, and why she didn’t seem to be able to turn it back on.

 

Elliot smiled. “That was subtle. How much wine have you had?”

 

“Way too much,” Olivia replied, exhaustion and embarrassment flooding through her in equal measure. She rummaged through her purse for her wallet, but for the second time that night, Elliot put his palm against her skin, his fingers soft on her forearm.

 

“No way. I invited you. Tonight’s on me. And don’t leave just because I’m being a pain in the ass. I’ll answer your question.”

 

Olivia said nothing, but she dropped her purse back onto the barstool next to her and waited. Elliot scrutinized the label on his beer as if the answer were obviously printed right there. Olivia remained still; he’d speak when he felt like it.

 

He always did.

 

“The night before-“ He started again. “The night we caught that case, right before Douglas took off with me, Kathy and I had it out.” He shrugged out of his jacket as if it were impeding his ability to express himself. “Condensed version is that we decided we’d done the getting married because we were having a baby thing once already. I think we both. . . thought maybe we could try, but that night. . . .“ Whatever might have been left of his sentence vanished into vapor.

 

“Anyway.” He pushed himself off the barstool and reached for his wallet, tossing a twenty onto the bar-top that was now pristine save for the interlocking circles of condensation left by his beer bottle and her wine glass. “It’s done. We’re having dinner in a couple weeks to hash out the details.” He grabbed his jacket.

 

Olivia stood, swallowing hard as she forced herself to look at him again. They both stood there, a few feet apart, his jacket on his arm and her purse in hers, but neither of them moved or spoke. At least thirty seconds passed before Elliot said, his voice taut, “I think one of us has to make the first move here.”

 

Olivia had the overwhelming impulse to burst into the kind of hysterical laughter that instantly makes everyone around you shifty and uncomfortable. _Congratulations. I’ve been thinking that for years._ Because she knew her impulse control tank was running on fumes, she instead focused intently on the way her shoes pinched painfully against the outer edge of her feet, and the impulse passed.

 

“Yeah. It’s late,” she said instead. _Wow. That was original. Really._

 

“I just feel like-“ Elliot looked at the door and stopped.

 

“What?” She unconsciously held her breath, waiting for him to cannonball into the subject they’d been avoiding for two weeks.

 

“Nothing. I’ll walk you to the cab.”

 

_________________

The outdoor air assaulted them in a chilly rush as they moved outside. Elliot glanced down the street to his left, considering how unbelievably annoying it was to possess the capacity to argue with yourself. Clearly platypuses and tapirs did _not_ do this, and at the moment he would have willingly traded places with either of these bizarre and lesser known members of the animal kingdom.

 

He didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the human psyche, but up in the Adirondacks, when he’d had hour after hour with nothing but the random meanderings of his thoughts to entertain him, Elliot had wondered about the phenomenon of memory. About the way in which, when something life-altering is taking place, you don’t usually stop and say to yourself, _I need to memorize every detail of this moment, because I’m going to want to hit the playback button in my head again and again, every day until I die_. It was typically only _after_ the event that you understood its significance.

 

Not this time.

 

As he turned his head to look at Olivia (her attention was focused on the dancing lights decorating a large sign across the street), he knew beyond even the smallest ion of doubt that this was one of those moments. So, although he couldn’t do it with his hands as he had in his dream, he mapped her body with his eyes. The fabric of her dress tilting around her legs as the breeze drifted past. The slope of her hip as it moved upward to her waist. The goosebumps on her forearms as she hugged them to her chest. He would have offered her his jacket but he knew she’d turn him down, so he didn’t waste the time.

 

He had better things to do.

 

His eyes traveled up, slowing at the place where her neck met her shoulder -- he wondered what her skin smelled like right there. What it would be like to touch his lips to her skin and feel her heart beating in his mouth. Her lips, slightly chapped and covered with traces of burgundy lipstick she’d probably applied very carefully at the beginning of the evening, but that didn’t stand a chance against all that wine and conversation. Finally her eyes, somewhere else entirely, the dual furrow between them deeper and more noticeable than usual. A gust of wind lifted her hair and he smiled as she unconsciously pushed it out of her face.

 

“I’ll miss you,” he said, very softly, and as if magically summoned, a cab turned the corner a few blocks away. His arm, oddly separate from the rest of him, hailed it on autopilot.

 

Olivia lifted her eyes, and this time they were all the way in the present, for this split second of time unfiltered, holding out the truth like a gift: Anger and resentment, yes. Undoubtedly. But more than that. Sadness. Longing.

 

Love.

 

“I’ll miss _you_ ,” she replied, her voice unsteady.

 

Then, although before that exact second he’d been relatively sure she’d lost the capacity to surprise him, she proved him wrong again. She took two small steps forward, closing the gap between their bodies, and put her arms around his neck.

 

_Remember. Everything. Last time._

The voice in his head had chosen this moment to be helpful rather than aggravating. The instant she touched him he felt her already pulling away, but he wrapped his arms around her waist so tightly he could feel her ribs pushing against the bones in his elbows. He expected instant resistance, but when his arms closed around her she relaxed against him.

 

He shut his eyes and turned his face into her hair, perplexed by the human capacity to experience suffering and gratitude simultaneously. He could hardly breathe against the huge grenade of pain exploding inside of him as if someone kept pulling out a new pin. And yet, for once he was aware in the moment that he needed to concentrate on nothing but absorption.

 

Because this was what he got. Maybe thirty seconds with her in his arms. One infinitesimal moment stuck like their picture in his magazines, lit from behind with each time he’d failed to hold her in the past and from ahead with each time he’d never hold her in the future.

 

But where the light met in the middle, while he breathed her shampoo and her coconut body wash and the taste of wine left on her breath, everything was illuminated.

 

The cab’s brakes squeaked as it pulled up to the curb. Elliot forced his arms to release her, and Olivia’s body was separate from his again. He felt unexpectedly dizzy; he hadn’t had more than two beers.

 

Her fingers slipped under the handle of the cab’s door, but she looked back for a second, her eyes glittering with tears he knew she hated. “We’ll do dinner next week, okay?” It came out in a whisper; her vocal cords seemed to have malfunctioned.

 

“Definitely.” His own voice sounded as if he were experiencing a terrible cell phone connection.

 

The cab door shut, a hundred times louder in his mind than logic told him was possible in the confines of the real world, and the yellow blur merged into the almost non-existent traffic, growing smaller and smaller within seconds.

 

She was gone.

 

________________

 

At 3:12 a.m., Olivia lay in bed, shifting restlessly from one side to the other, flipping to her stomach and then to her back again, and observing the patterns that her butterfly night light made on the wall. In one place, the light looked like angel wings, and she gave a bitter internal laugh, grateful that she didn’t believe in angels anyway. Her covers were all clumped at the foot of the bed; she felt hot all over.

 

 _Bam bam bam bam bam._ She jolted upright, her tension tolerance already maxed out, and exhaled in exhaustion, because there was only one person on the planet who would be banging on her door at 3:13 a.m.

 

She was dressed in a tank top and boxers, but Elliot wasn’t coming in anyway, so she didn’t bother to add a layer. Running a hand through her hair as she walked quickly down the hall, she cycled frantically through the phrases mostly likely to get rid of him as quickly as possible.

 

Yanking the door open a few inches, she said, her voice low but uncompromisingly firm, “Go away, Elliot. It’s three in the morning and I’m not doing this.”

 

Then she lifted her gaze and looked at his face. He was almost frighteningly white, but his eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with red. Even the surrounding skin looked chafed. He stood with one hand against her doorframe, exhaustion radiating off of him in palpable waves.

 

“No,” he said, the strength in his voice a direct contrast to everything else about his demeanor.

 

“No?” she retorted, opening the door slightly wider.

 

“No.” He pulled his fingers from the doorframe and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I just spent three hours standing in front of that fucking hotel, and I finally realized that I’m not gonna let it go down this way.” He paused, as if expecting she might interject; when she didn’t, he plunged ahead. “I’m not leaving. I need to explain something.”

 

Although every better instinct inside her screamed that she should body slam the door shut, she swung it open instead, watched his body as he strode past her, and clicked the door closed behind him, her hand clutching the doorknob because she had no idea what else was left to hold onto.

 


	11. Chapter 11

Every time I look at you the world just melts away

All my troubles all my fears dissolve in your affections

You’ve seen me at my weakest but you take me as I am

And when I fall you offer me a softer place to land

~~~~Sarah McLachlan: Push

 

_________________

 

Olivia gave her doorknob one final bruising squeeze before releasing it and taking a few steps toward Elliot. Given the hour and the content of their last conversation, she expected that he’d be jittery and agitated, but he seemed disconcertingly calm, standing motionless in her living room, his feet planted a few steps apart and his hands shoved in his pockets. She thought again how rarely she saw him in a suit anymore, and how everything was much safer and more manageable that way.

 

Abruptly, she remembered her own attire and said quickly, “If you’re planning to stay for awhile, I’d rather change my clothes.”

 

“Fine. I’ll wait.” He navigated around the end of the couch and sat down, scuffing the tips of his shiny black dress shoes into her carpet. Despite the relaxed, deliberate nature of his movements, Olivia sensed that he could barely bite back whatever it was he’d come to say.

 

She shook her head and walked down the hall into her bedroom, flipping on the light and searching through her second drawer for a moment until she found a long sleeved t-shirt to pull on over her tank top. Before she left the room again, she put her fingers flat against the grainy brown wood atop her dresser and drew in several deep, long breaths. She didn’t feel drunk anymore, just shaky and irritable, and somehow she knew that whatever the upcoming conversation held, it was unlikely to leave her more composed.

 

However, Elliot in these moods was immovable.

 

So.

 

She forced herself to lift her hands, turn around, and head for the door, figuring she might as well get it over with.

 

When she reemerged in the living room, Elliot hadn’t stirred. She sat on the other end of the couch, legs curled beneath her, the closest thing to the fetal position she could achieve without violating the rules of acceptable human behavior when in the room with another person. The goodbye scene at the hotel had taken so much out of her that she wasn’t sure what remained in her arsenal. Besides, Elliot was the last person with whom she wanted to take a voyage on the U.S.S. Self Discovery.

 

As usual he hadn’t asked her.

 

He didn’t hesitate for a second once she sat down. His voice hoarse with exhaustion, he said, “Will you do something for me?”

 

“What?” She stared at him warily.

 

“For the next fifteen minutes, could we cut the bullshit? If I ask you something, can you-“ He broke off. “Skip the runaround? Tell me the truth?”

 

 _Are you insane, Elliot? The bullshit’s our last line of defense._ But her desire to hear what he wanted to say unexpectedly eclipsed her terror, so she acquiesced. “Okay.”

 

“Okay,” he repeated. He fell silent for a full thirty seconds, observing the weave on the sleeves of his jacket, before he eventually said, “In the hospital, when I told you about my dreams, why did you blow me off and disappear?”

 

She had to give him points for his eternal ability to catch her off guard. Still, she’d made a promise, so she looked at him and replied, “I already told you. It was a dead-end conversation.”

 

“And?” he prompted.

 

“And it was also just. . . bizarre, Elliot! You’re my partner. It made me uncomfortable.”

 

“Why?”

 

“You’re joking, right? You said you dreamed about me in bed with you. How did you expect me to respond to that?”

 

Still unphased, he said softly, “When I was gone, did you dream about me?”

 

 _Fuck_. “Elliot. Let me make some coffee and we can talk-”

 

“Did you?”

 

Her whole throat felt warm. “Yes.”

 

“Will you tell me?” He still wasn’t moving, so perfectly still with his hands on his thighs that she wanted to kick him just to make him react.

 

“I couldn’t see. Everything was dark. I could hear you talking, but. . . “ She rubbed the hem of her t-shirt between her thumb and forefinger, trying not to think about the pine in the dream. The pine five feet away from her.

 

“What else?” He shifted a bit this time, reclining further into the couch.

 

“Why does there have to be more? I was so tired I could have dreamed about screwing Dick Cheney.”

 

“What else?” he repeated, cool and unrelenting.

 

She grabbed a throw pillow from the couch and wrapped her arms firmly around it, pressing her fingertips into the bones of her elbow. “I wound up in your bed. Terrified. It was still dark, but you put your hand on me and told me that you were right there.” Her voice made a strange twist on the last syllable, so she cleared her throat and continued. “Then I just kept falling. And I woke up.”

 

“Where’d I put my hand?” The corner of his mouth twitched, and she hated him for having a sense of humor, even now.

 

“Doesn’t matter. Are we done?” She suddenly wanted an extremely cold beer, despite the lingering nausea.

 

“No. But I’ll talk for a second if that’ll make you less jumpy.” He loosened his tie and rubbed his hands over his eyes. “I don’t think I told you the strangest question Uncle Jack ever asked me.”

 

“Probably not,” she retorted. “Why don’t you tell me when we have dinner next week?”

 

“Because I’m gonna tell you right now,” he shot back. Again she had that flash of gratitude that she’d never had to square off against him in interrogation.

 

His face softened and he sighed. “Sorry. I think-“ He paused, and she silently scrutinized his face, suddenly aware that whatever was about to come out of his mouth was one of those things you could never take back. He continued softly, “It might take me a second here. To explain. The reason I came here instead of going home.”

 

Olivia relaxed her hold on the pillow. “Take your time,” she said dryly. “I’m awake now anyway.”

 

“You were awake before I got here.” He said it with such conviction that at any other time she might have been irritated by his certainty, but the conversation was slowly taking on such a surreal quality that she let his comment slide.

 

When he realized that she wasn’t going to respond, he said suddenly, “In the hospital, you said that we’re like oil and water.”

 

“Well it’s true!” she exclaimed, scaling back the volume when she noticed how worked up she sounded. “You’re really all over the place tonight.”

 

He sighed, the exhaustion floating off of him in expanding waves. “I know. But you’re right about the oil and water thing. Except tonight, when I was standing out in front of that hotel feeling like a jackass, I realized we have at least one thing in common.”

 

“And what’s that?”

 

“We’ve both spent our entire lives training ourselves not to want anything.”

 

She threw the pillow on the floor. “That’s ridiculous.”

 

“No. It’s not. That’s what my Uncle Jack asked me, Olivia. When I was eight or nine. He asked me what I wanted most in the entire world. And even then I didn’t have an answer because I was already an expert at wanting nothing.”

 

“That’s crap. You want lots of things. Yesterday you wanted Munch’s Twix so bad you stole it off his desk when he went to pee.”

 

Elliot grinned. “It was good, too. But I’m not talking about-“ He leaned forward and shrugged out of his jacket, tossing it over the back of the couch. Olivia stared at the fibers in the fabric, how they interlocked in such a way that it was hard to tell where one ended and the next one began. “I don’t mean things I want for other people. I mean things I want for myself.”

 

“Oh,” she said automatically, as if she understood, which she didn’t at all.

 

He suddenly focused on her more intently than he had since walking in the door and said hesitantly, “If you. . . had known that I was going to die out there, would you have done anything differently?”

 

Before she could inhale again, she was back on the roof, head on her knees, sobbing until it hurt each time she tried to inhale. The memory was so vivid that she could feel the scratchy hardness of the brick wall rubbing against her skin through the thin fabric of her shirt.

 

Without thinking, she stood abruptly and said, “I’m thirsty. I’ll be back in a second.”

 

She walked into the kitchen, her breathing short and panicky. The knot in her throat warned her that she was seconds away from tears, and since Cry In Front of Elliot was undoubtedly on her top ten list of things she did _not_ want to do tonight, she jammed her glass against the lever of the fridge’s water dispenser and tried to distract herself by watching the translucent liquid glide out and slowly rise toward the rim. When the frigid water finally reached the top, she raised the glass to her lips, tipped her head back, and drained the entire thing without breathing, hoping the lump would wash right down with it.

 

Turning to put the glass in the sink, she almost smacked into Elliot, who had somehow moved silently and now stood less than two feet away from her. “Shit! Do you have to do that?” She slammed the glass down and glared at him.

 

“You didn’t answer my question,” he stated evenly, but she could feel the anger now, sliding off him in bands like lake effect snow.

 

“Because it’s irrelevant. You didn’t die. You’re here.” She stepped back again, anything to distance his body from hers, since the lump in her throat appeared to have a direct correlation to his physical proximity. “And you know what?” she continued, her voice rising. “What you’re doing right now? _This_ is why I left.”

 

“You left to avoid this conversation?” he queried, his volume escalating to match hers.

 

She wondered if her neighbors could hear them, and tried to reign herself in when she spoke again. “Maybe! You told me once that you’re the longest relationship I’ve ever had with a man. And you said it as if this was some big revelation. As if I’d never thought about it before.” She took another step away from him, her hands clenched into livid spheres. “But I _have_ thought about it. A lot. That’s why I tried to talk to you after Gitano. And you walked, Elliot. You walked right out the door in the middle of that conversation. Now you’re here with your whole ‘Let’s cut the bullshit’ routine, but somehow it only applies to _me._ ”

 

“Fair enough,” he answered immediately.

 

“What?”

 

“You’re right. You want me to take a turn?”

 

“Not really,” she muttered. “I want you to go home so I can go to sleep.”

 

He kept going as if she hadn’t spoken. “The picture in my _Newsweeks?_ The one you found when you went to my apartment? Do you know what I wanted to do after the photographer walked away, when I looked at you and my eyes were still all blurry from the flash?”

 

“Have another vodka tonic?” It occurred to her that there wasn’t enough distance on the planet at this point to make the lump disappear.

 

“You’re funny. No. I wanted to kiss you. I looked at your lips. Didn’t even mean to. But you were wearing that burgundy lipstick-“ He halted, the words seeming to jumble themselves as he tried to arrange them.  “And they were shiny because you’d just taken a sip of your drink. All I could think about was the-“ He cleared his throat softly. “What it would feel like to let myself. . . to put my mouth on you.”

 

“Goddamnit, El-“

 

“No. Let me finish.” Her eyes widened but she closed her mouth, wondering how fast your heart had to beat before you dropped dead of a heart attack.

 

There was a way out.

 

“But I did what I always do. I told myself that I was drunk, that you were dressed up, that we’d spent twenty hours a day together that week because of the McMarsten case, that your perfume reminded me of Amy Cotugno. Whatever.”

 

“Exactly,” she assented, her voice flat. “We learned about this crap in the academy, Elliot. It doesn’t mean anything.”

 

He watched her face for a few moments, and then walked over to the sink, filling her discarded glass with tap water. He took a long swallow. “What do you picture when you think about your life ten years down the road?”

 

She felt as if she were on one of those carnival rides that swirls you in concentric circles. “I don’t,” she answered simply. “You know I’m not a planner.”

 

“The truth.” He put the glass down and stepped closer to her. If she extended her arm now, her hand would touch his chest, and she had no idea why she was thinking about that.

 

He kept going. “Do you want a family? A house in the suburbs? Golden retriever?”

 

Her eyes filled with tears; she didn’t even know how to name the emotion that provoked them. It was all too mixed up. In a whisper she said, “I want to not be having this conversation anymore.”

 

Elliot took another step forward, officially smashing through her personal space barrier. She inhaled the pine cologne and seething frustration rising off of his skin, and wished fleetingly that she’d decided to be a dentist. She felt the first tear track down her cheek. Why, when she hated him this much, did walking away feel akin to slicing off her own arm?

 

He shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking. That I’m somehow enjoying this. I’m not. Tonight I just decided that for once in my life I was gonna admit that I wanted something.”

 

“Fine. What do you want?” Her voice shook but she was too angry to care.

 

“I’m not sure,” he conceded.

 

“Well. That’s genius. Do you see why I’m over this insane dance we’re doing right now? Will you go _home_?”

 

Again he ignored her. “But I know what I don’t want. I don’t want for it to be ten years from now, and the two of us are meeting for lunch once every six months, swapping meaningless anecdotes about my grandkids or the latest case you’ve cracked in your superstar computer crimes career.” He’d run out of air, so he paused. “In that fucking car, Olivia, I thought about you literally every ten seconds. I don’t think that’s normal behavior for partners. Do you?”

 

She wiped at one of her eyes. “No. But who cares? I’m not doing this.”

 

“Doing what? What the hell are we doing?” His anger at such close range hurt her ears.

 

“ _This_.” Her voice cracked and she swallowed. It didn’t help. “This is why I left. You want honest? Fine. I haven’t been on a date in over a year because I’d rather be sitting in a car catching cases with you. Does it get a lot more pathetic than that? I don’t think so.”

 

She paused, steadying her breathing a little, although the tears still slid down her face, pissing her off more by the second. “I’m not throwing out whatever the hell it is we have left here because you had some sort of epiphany on the mountaintop. You’re my best friend, and we’ve fucked even that up enough, don’t you think?”

 

“Yeah. I do. Which is why it stops now.” He lifted his hand and put it gently on her cheek, his touch so light she could barely sense it. But it was there. His thumb smoothed over the wet streaks on her skin. _Back up. Back the fuck up_. She couldn’t decide if she was referring to herself or to him.

 

She didn’t back up.

 

His other hand joined the first, so that both of his thumbs were sweeping rhythmically across her face. He leaned forward until his forehead touched hers.

 

“When I was out there, you wanna guess how many times I sat on my hands to keep from calling you and running through however many minutes I had left?”

 

“Probably about as often as I washed mine to keep them busy. But Elliot, we can’t just-“

 

“Yeah. We can. Look at me.” He tilted her face up until she had no choice but to focus on his eyes. Without warning, a slideshow of all the things she’d never allowed herself to want in this life flashed across her internal projection screen.

 

Trips to the ice cream store on Saturday afternoon, because her Mom was too drunk. Someone to notice that she’d gotten straight As on her first high school report card. A family vacation – didn’t matter what kind. A cat. A boyfriend who stuck around for more than a month and a half. A friend who didn’t get that aggravatingly predictable change of expression the moment Olivia said anything about her father. A job she could leave behind when she walked out the door at five.

 

 _Elliot_.

 

She felt his breath on her mouth for a split second before his lips touched hers. He tasted like beer and the full collection of everything she wasn’t supposed to desire, and she told herself that she’d back up in a second.

 

One second.

 

Okay, maybe two.

 

Because now she was closer than she’d ever been to the pine on his neck and the calluses on his fingertips. His lips brushed hers again, harder this time, and his hands slid down to hold her neck, just slightly. The pulse in her throat mingled with the beat in his thumbs, and she realized that she wasn’t the only one in danger of having a heart attack.

 

His tongue touched the inside of her upper lip and she opened her mouth without thinking. Her hands slid up his arms to his shoulders, the friction of his shirt hot on her palms. She could feel the tension humming in his muscles, and all she wanted was to get closer. She eliminated the last few inches between them and put her own hands to the back of his neck, pulling him toward her. His lips were so soft; kissing him felt like the solution to an equation that had always lurked in the back of her mind without her knowledge.

 

Without warning, Elliot moved his mouth away from hers. Gently touching each segment of her skin as he went, he edged his way down until his lips were pressed against the pulse point in her neck. He drew a slow series of circles with the edge of his tongue, and her entire body broke into goosebumps for the third time that night.

 

She wondered if that was a record.

 

Then suddenly, he stopped moving, his lips still and quiet against the column of her throat. She tensed, certain he was going to stop and say something rational. Her cheeks were already flooding with red when he murmured, his voice muffled against her skin, “This is what I thought about when we said goodbye tonight. When that fucking cab was driving up and I couldn’t even make a list of all the shit I should have said to you.”

 

The tears that had been barely below the surface all night floated up again, and she said in an odd-sounding gasp, “El, we can stop right now. Forget any of this happened.” But even as she said it, her fingers were moving in rhythmic ovals over the back of his neck and into his hair.

 

“We could stop,” he replied, lifting his head to look in her eyes again, his lips no more than an inch from hers. “But I don’t want to. Do you?” His thumb traced over the edge of her earlobe. “And remember, you promised to be honest tonight.”

 

She smiled, unable to help herself, and shook her head. Silently, she slid her hands down his chest and reached for the buttons of his shirt.

 

_________________

 

In the shadowy semi-darkness of her bedroom, Elliot lay facing Olivia, the palm of his hand moving back and forth over her hip. They’d somehow made it down the hallway, alternately kissing and shedding pieces of clothing. It wasn’t until his fingers released the clasp on her bra (the plastic click much louder in his head than logic allowed for), and her hands slipped beneath the elastic of his boxers that he realized he was no longer in dehydration-induced dreamland.

 

Now, naked in bed with her, with chilly cotton on one side of him and the warmth of her bare thigh on the other, Elliot felt so overstimulated that his chest was tight; he had to remind himself to take deep breaths instead of tiny shallow ones. It was one thing to fantasize about having sex with Olivia when he was alone in the shower after a sixteen hour day, and quite another to be skin to skin with her, close enough to her sheets that he could smell whatever coconut-scented product had soaked into them.

 

Her voice floated through the shadows, almost startling him despite the fact that he was touching her. “You really need to say something now. I can hear you thinking. It’s freaking me out.”

 

“Sorry.” He bent his head forward and touched his lips to her cheekbone, hoping that every second ticking past was imprinting itself on his brain. For the second time tonight, he was in the middle of a moment he knew he never wanted to forget. Yet this one didn’t threaten to push him beyond his capacity for pain tolerance. Instead, it felt so overwhelmingly good he wasn’t sure he could handle that either.

 

The good was a great deal less familiar than the bad.

 

“Elliot. Tell me.” She pulled back enough that his hand dropped from her body onto the bed.

 

He cleared his throat and listened to the lazy hum of the ceiling fan. “I kept fading in and out, in the car. And the dreams-“ He put his thumb softly on her lower lip, moving it infinitesimally back and forth. She shifted toward him a little, but said nothing, waiting for him to continue. “I kept trying to map you with my hands. I was terrified that I’d never get the chance again, that I’d never know what it felt like to touch you.” His voice sounded rough and strange to him, but he’d been so insistent on her honesty that he didn’t want to flinch when it was his turn.

 

“Do it. Go ahead.” Now, her voice was nothing like the receptionist voice he’d gotten in the hospital. With that sound reverberating through his nerve endings, he had to fight the urge to pin her right there and be done with it.

 

“I want to, but-“

 

“But what?” Her voice was rising in frustration, and he could hear a tremor that hadn’t been there a minute ago. “Do you have any idea how exposed I feel right now, Elliot? I’ll admit I’ve had the occasional fantasy about what it might be like to have you in bed with me, but none of them included your sudden urge to wax philosophical.” She exhaled. “I told you I didn’t need this.”

 

She went to pull away but he was too quick for her. His hand closed over her upper arm, firmly enough to keep her there, but not hard enough to hurt.

 

“Liv, no. You don’t-” _Fuck. You’ve probably got about ten seconds. Don’t blow it._ “We’re just-“ He broke off again. “I’m used to feeling in control of things when-“ He bit his lip. “And if I keep touching you-“

 

Before he could finish, he felt her hand on his shoulder and the weight of her body pushing him onto his back. She landed fully on top of him, skin to skin, the smoothness of her stomach brushing his ribs. He felt her hair slide across his face as she kissed the curve of his jaw and said softly, “It doesn’t matter. It’s just me.”

 

 _Just her_. He thought he should probably say something about how ridiculous that statement was.

 

Then her tongue was sliding along his collarbone, her thumb was in his mouth, and he wasn’t thinking about anything anymore.

 

He slipped one hand into the back of her hair. For a long time, he kissed her, slowly discovering that he could make her breathing shift and change simply by stroking her tongue or the roof of her mouth in a different way.

 

He’d imagined her body beneath his significantly more often than he’d ever been willing to admit to himself. But _this_. Being in her bed. Her hair in his fingers. Her pulse on his mouth. It was as if someone had discovered the sharpness and brightness buttons on his experiential remote control, and fine-tuned everything to create perceptual overload.

 

Eventually he couldn’t stand it anymore, and his hands took over where they’d left off in his dream, wandering over her body in unpredictable patterns. She was restless now, too, her lips on his stomach, his bicep, the inside of his wrist. Once, at the ocean, he’d been caught off-guard by a breaker and slammed off his feet. Twisting, rolling, falling. Entirely out of control. At the mercy of the water.

 

Powerless.

 

Like this.

 

He felt her shifting, and before his body had a chance to react, he was inside her, his hands holding her hips.

 

She ran her palms slowly down the inside of his arms until her fingers laced through his. Her lips smoothed over his cheekbone to the edge of his hair, and then she unexpectedly pulled back to look at him. The room held just enough light to allow him to see her expression.

 

She caught his gaze. Held it.

 

Her face was illuminated with nine years of whatever the hell described their connection. He watched her eyes, thinking how sometimes, at the precise moment when you were convinced there was nothing left that could shake you. . .

 

She went absolutely still as she looked at him, and though biology was impelling him to move, Elliot forced his body to match the tranquility of hers, waiting for her to make the choice. Decide what came next. As he took a deep breath, her lips curved into a tiny smile. She began to move, her hips pressing against him, into him, gently at first, but gradually with more force.

 

Her eyes remained locked on his, and he gazed at her as she let her body take over, squeezing his fingers so tightly it almost hurt, but he wouldn’t have changed a thing.

 

He wanted to kiss her.

 

But he couldn’t look away.

 

Olivia’s breathing shifted, becoming erratic. He felt her whole body tighten against him, and her eyes widened as she rocked into him again and breathed, “El-“ The rest of his name was cut off by her sharp gasp, and he lay beneath her, mesmerized by the way her face changed as she came in his arms.

 

Her body was trembling. Sliding his hands from hers, he brought them to her face, his fingers tracing the curved hollows beneath her eyes, which still hadn’t left his. She was flushed and terrified. He kissed her. Once. Twice. Then, slipping one hand to the small of her back and the other to the base of her neck, he relinquished the control he now understood had never been more than a comforting illusion.

 

The control he’d never had when it came to her.

 

His arms tightened around her ribs, her skin hot on his, and he could still feel her shaking. He pushed upward, rocking into her again and again while she still held his eyes with hers. The combination of the soft cotton on his back and the heat of her skin pressed against the length of his body made him lightheaded. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the sensation of her hair beneath his fingers and her skin on his palms.

 

“Liv. Jesus.” She pushed down on him this time, and when he came, he didn’t close his eyes.

 

He wasn’t sure he was still breathing.

 

After a moment, Olivia dropped her forehead to his shoulder and held it there. He kept his arms fiercely around her, wondering when she was going to stop trembling.

 

He kissed her shoulder. Tasted salt. Her breathing had slowed and calmed, though his was still uneven. After remaining silent for a few more seconds, he said, his voice hushed and uncertain, “You okay?”

 

Her breath brushed his shoulder as she answered him. “I don’t know. I didn’t-“

 

He started to laugh. “Think this would happen tonight?”

 

She rolled off of him, and goosebumps rose on the places she’d been touching. She reached for the sheet, pulling it haphazardly up to their hips. “No.” Her voice was barely audible. “I didn’t think this would ever happen.” She paused. “This is the part where you say you’d better take off, right?”

 

He opened his mouth quickly, but closed it again without speaking. He’d been about to say _What the hell would make you think that?_ , but the question answered itself in his mind before his tongue had time to form the words. Of course she’d think that. He’d spent years sending her signals so mixed that anti-encryption software probably couldn’t crack the code; it made perfect sense that she’d dismiss what had just happened as a late night lapse of logic or a friendship fuck to say goodbye.

 

Maybe merely an acknowledgment that they’d both become too tired to prevent the avalanche of sexual tension from shoving them off the precipice.

 

He had a flash of longing for the simplicity of being ten again, when the things he most loved were both easy to attain and easy to keep. Olivia certainly wasn’t the former, and the latter?

 

Well. He had no clue.

 

He reached for one of her hands and flipped it over, drawing ovals with his thumb across the bottom of her palm and the top of her wrist. “I’m not going anywhere.” Then he thought maybe that sounded too emphatic and added, “Unless you’re kicking me out.”

 

“I’m not,” she said quickly, staring down at the pattern his thumb was creating. “But-“

 

“But what?”

 

“Forget it.“ She swallowed, still avoiding his eyes.

 

He released her hand, working to control his response to the wash of frustration that flooded his system. “You’re surprised I want to stay,” he said, his voice flat. “Why?”

 

“I don’t know,” she mumbled, fiddling with a tiny raised wrinkle in the sheet.

 

“Olivia.” The frustration had already evaporated, leaving behind only a sort of intangible sadness. He took her jaw in his hand and tilted her face up towards his.

 

She lifted her eyes, and he almost laughed in relief when he saw her expression. He’d expected regret. Anger. Maybe bitterness. But the only thing there was fear, and for some reason, fear he figured he could handle. Maybe because between them it was new, a refreshing change from all the old emotions they’d played football with for what seemed like centuries.

 

He took a long breath, mentally crossing his fingers that whatever was about to come out of his mouth bore at least a slight resemblance to what was transpiring in his head. His voice sounded gravelly and strained. “You honestly think I let myself touch you-“ He cleared his throat. “For the first time in nine years so I could jump out of bed, pull on my clothes, and head home?”

 

“I told you before I left, Elliot. You don’t know what you want.”

 

He surveyed her, the sheet now pulled up to her chest in a subconscious attempt at self-protection. A slow smile snuck up on him before he could pull it back. “You’re wrong,” he said softly. “This once.”

 

Her eyes went shiny again. She scrubbed the back of her hand over them, angry and frayed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight,” she muttered, rolling onto her back and staring at the ceiling.

 

“Why does it piss you off so much to cry in front of me?”

 

“It’s not you,” she fired back. “I hate crying in front of anyone.” She pushed her hair away from her face. “But shit, Elliot. Five minutes ago we were having sex and now I’m crying. That’s hot.”

 

“You have no idea.” His voice was funny now, too, rough and unpredictable. He leaned on his elbow, gently tugging the sheet she held bunched in her closed hand. She let it go, and he pushed it down far enough so that he could place his hand on her bare chest, his palm on her heart and his fingers brushing the hollow of her throat. He felt her swallow.

 

“That’s where your hand was,” she said in a whisper.

 

“What?” he asked, confused.

 

“In my dream. When you told me you were right here. That’s where you put your hand.”

 

“Thank you.” His throat ached.

 

“For what?” She looked embarrassed and almost as wrung out as she had in the hospital.

 

“I don’t know.” He smiled, wishing he didn’t suddenly feel so. . . shy? Awkward? “Answering my question. Being direct. I can’t-“ He pushed a strand of hair away from her face. “I guess almost dying lowered my tolerance for double talk.”

 

She offered a strained laugh. “Well that sucks. It’s what we do.”

 

The movement of her chest as she breathed lifted and lowered his hand, and even in the subdued light he could tell that she remained more flushed than usual. He idly wondered if they were even capable of allowing their meticulously constructed fortresses to remain demolished for more than five minutes at a stretch.

 

Elliot shifted against the bed, moving his body closer to hers, until their legs were almost touching again. Without moving his hand, he kissed the curve of her shoulder, the base of her neck, the slope just above her eyebrow.

 

She was merely watching him, her eyes warm now but still unreadable. Somewhere behind the wary filter of her expression lay the composite of all the different aspects of her he’d witnessed over the past decade. Sobbing and overwhelmed, vomiting in a trashcan. Sweaty, gasping, and smart-assed, flicking him shit about a case as she ran on the treadmill. Pissed off and defiant, determined not to change anything just because Richard White wanted to kill her. Furious and out of control, kicking the crap out of Thatcher. Face-to-face with both him and Gitano, the moment the double-talk had stopped working for good.

 

And now, in some strange sense full circle. Naked and scared, but not yet running as he’d expected she might.

 

He thought maybe it was significant that he wasn’t running either.

 

Elliot put one hand flat against the edge of her knee and smoothed upward, stopping to rest it on the inside of her thigh. “So,” he said, his voice relaxed now. Teasing. “In your dream, did I put my hand here?”

 

She grinned. “Not telling.”

 

He leaned to kiss the curve of her waist, then slid his hand to where his lips had been. “How about here?”

 

“Shut up, Elliot,” she retorted, but she didn’t pull away.

 

Even though she was joking with him now, the remnants of fear lingered in her eyes. It occurred to him that maybe he should stop feeling her up and give her some space. He yanked his hand back. “Sorry.”

 

“Actually, I’m not minding,” she said quietly, a touch of mischief creeping into her tone.

 

“No?”

 

“No.” She slid over a few inches and leaned forward to touch her lips to his chest before she dropped her head back on the pillow. Her leg inched its way between his. He drew in a sharp breath and tried to remember that under the current circumstances, he didn’t have to try to stop his body from reacting.

 

His voice a bit higher than normal, he said, “So you’ve never been camping?”

 

“You want to talk about camping?” She scooted even closer, her stomach brushing against his hip.

 

“Cut it out or I won’t be able to talk at all.” He snatched her hand as it slipped down his ribs, touching them one by one.

 

“Good plan.” She twisted her wrist to free herself.

 

He remembered, vividly, the frigid lifelike darkness in the back of the Ford. How to him, right then, desire and longing had felt like nothing but weight. Pressure. Pain. Pushing at him from every direction at once. The desire to call his kids and talk about nothing of any consequence. The desire, despite everything, to know what his new child would look and sound like. The desire to hear Olivia’s voice, for a few more minutes. The deesire to look at her so she could know before he was gone that she hadn’t been the only one.

 

He knew that’s what she’d thought. After Gitano.

 

She was kissing him now and he moved over her. The sheet had slipped to the bottom of the bed. He could see the contours of her body in the shadows cast by her butterfly night-light, and the incongruity of the image made him smile.

 

He’d tease her about it later.

 

He held her face as her tongue touched his, causing his entire body to tense with anticipation in way it hadn’t for a very long time. Finally, her eyes weren’t frightened anymore. They were laughing. Expectant.

 

And for Elliot, desire was no longer an oppressive weight, an immense collection of all his mistakes.

 

It still surrounded him, but now it was lighter than air.


End file.
